Occupational Hazard
by Faye M.A
Summary: Future-fic! Set in Berk when the gang is about 38 years old. When she and Hiccup get forcibly separated by diplomatic relations, Astrid must raise their three children on her own for a time.
1. Chapter 1

_Hello again, dear readers! I apologize for being absent for so long. I've been working on several different things, including a_ Harry Potter _AU fic that is looking like it's going to be as long as my_ Avengers _one! So bear with me. In the meantime, I've been meaning to edit and post this one for a little bit, so here we go! A little_ How to Train your Dragon _future-fic! This one is set when the gang is about 38 years old or so. It's ten chapters._

 _As always, I love hearing your thoughts and opinions! Leave a comment for me! Have a story idea you'd like me to consider writing? Leave a comment! Seriously, you guys are awesome, and I love when you share what you're thinking. Thanks for reading!_

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Astrid smiled to herself as she bent, putting the bread into the flames of the oven and dusting the flour from her hands. This loaf was likely to be her best one yet. For nearly twenty years, she had been learning anything the older women of Berk would teach her, doing all that she could to improve her abysmal cooking skills. Even Hiccup had had a thing or two to show her.

Over the years, she had improved—as Hiccup had always so graciously pointed out via an unintentionally snarky remark—in her own skills, though (neither of them mentioned it) he was still better. When he had the time, he would wordlessly take the initiative and do the cooking, something for which she had always been grateful. It had never seemed like a bother to him; in fact, he had always said it helped him unwind at the end of a long day of chiefing. "It's no night flight," he'd say with a somewhat tight, wistful grin, "but it's something."

Astrid didn't need to be told to understand how he still—after nearly fifteen years—sorely ached for his dragon. For a long time after all the dragons had left Berk, they all had. Hiccup, however illogical it was, clung to the hope that someday, they might return; in the meantime, he had suffered in ways that only one who had lost a best friend could suffer.

He rarely mentioned Toothless, but Astrid knew he thought of him often. Just about everything in the world reminded her of Stormfly; Hiccup, who had always been unfathomably close with his Night Fury, probably had never truly stopped searching for him every time he looked to the horizon. The dull pain of it was a scar that hardly ever showed on him, but she remembered just how broken he had been when the Toothless had first left. Even after all this time, a shadow of that emptiness surfaced whenever anyone mentioned the dragons.

Cooking seemed to help Hiccup with that a bit, too; Astrid often caught him staring into the fire that burned under a pot of soup, occasionally coming out of his own thoughts long enough to stir the broth, and then disappearing back into his head almost immediately. After an hour or so of this, he'd come back to reality, and, if she placed her bet correctly, he was happier. He smiled more, at least. She had never quite understood why he did this, but she let him, respecting that everyone needed to grieve and cope in their own ways. She would always be there for him if and when he needed her, and she knew that he would do the same for her in a heartbeat.

She picked up an old rag and wiped off the table, where she had prepared the dough that was now baking in the oven. As she worked, the flour clouded up around her, and she smiled, closing her eyes. Moments like this and extremely foggy days were the closest she ever came to being up in the clouds anymore.

She hummed a little tune to herself as she resumed cleaning; the song reminded her of Hiccup, for some reason. But then, almost everything reminded her of Hiccup when he was gone. For the past two weeks, she had been alone with their children while he had been away on a rather sensitive diplomatic mission to a nearby island whose inhabitants had been showing undue interest in Berk and, apparently, considering an invasion. Hiccup, being Hiccup, had decided to pay them a visit first, with the intent of introducing himself and offering peace at the mutual advantage of both tribes. He did quite a lot of this; as such, Astrid wasn't unaccustomed to being without him for a time, but she was always more than ready for him to come home. And she never tired of the way his face lit up when he saw her running down the dock and into his arms.

Gods, she wanted him to just get home.

She already knew what she'd do the second she saw his face—that face that, to her, was the most beautiful thing in the world, freckles and all. She'd throw her arms around his neck and pull him as close as she could, and she'd kiss him, right there, in front of everybody, including their three children, who would undoubtedly make faces or otherwise show that they didn't appreciate their parents' open, publicly acknowledged affection. He would say something sarcastic, like, "Looks like somebody missed me," and then he would throw his traveling pack over one shoulder and let the other arm fall to her waist as they walked back up the hill to the village, discussing his journey and her time at home and laughing about both whether they were funny or not. He swore she even smiled in her sleep the night he returned from a trip, and, while she had no way of testing the validity of his claim, she did know that, the next day, her cheek muscles were always a tinge sore.

"Mom!"

Astrid looked up to see her youngest practically bouncing in the doorway, a massive smile on her face. "Come on, mom!" she said. "The boat's back!"

Without missing a beat, Astrid dropped her rag on the table, hurrying to follow her daughter. "Jorunn, wait!" she called, when the girl started running down the hill. Astrid laughed at her daughter's gait, her young, uncoordinated legs nearly stumbling more than once. There was a reason the girl's knees and palms were almost always grass-stained. "Slow down! He's not going anywhere," Astrid said, catching the end of Jorunn's blonde braid in a teasing tug that made the girl groan and slow to a slightly less precarious pace. "Where are your brothers?" she asked.

"Probably already down there," Jorunn said. "Vali said, if I didn't hurry, I might miss him!"

"Then why didn't you make Vali come get me?" Astrid asked, already sensing the answer on her daughter's tongue.

Jorunn sighed, raking her unruly bangs out of her face. "It was my turn," she grumbled.

Astrid laughed. "Kory hasn't done it in a while. You ought to make him do it next time."

"Mom," Jorunn moaned, "you _know_ Kory doesn't listen to me. Most of the time, he won't even listen to Vali. Dad says he's just like you were when you were younger."

"Well, you know your dad," Astrid said. "He's very perceptive. And so are you." She gave her daughter's hair a little ruffle, watching in amusement as she habitually raked it back into place. "What do you think he brought back with him this time?" she asked.

Jorunn's eyes grew wide at the reminder that Hiccup always brought each member of his family something special every time he went away to a new place. His gifts were always exotic, and they never failed to please. Once, he had even brought Astrid a bright, beautiful gemstone, the exact color of one of Stormfly's scales. She had had him mount it as a pendant, and she hadn't taken it off since. "I hope he brought me more of that special colored charcoal," Jorunn said. "I've tried to save the last ones, but they're almost gone."

Astrid grinned at the memory of her daughter's multicolored hands the day Hiccup had given her the chalk. She had gone through her sketchbook, adding splashes of color to every drawing she had put in the numerous pages. "You never know," she said to the girl. "He might have brought you more charcoal. Or he might have something even better."

As they crested the hill that hid the docks from view of their house, Astrid saw the mass of people convening at the freshly-moored ship; everyone on land was boarding to help unload, and everyone onboard was handing crates and baskets and satchels up from the hold. It was impossible to identify anybody in the melee, though Astrid tried anyway. When her efforts proved as fruitless as ever, she turned to Jorunn, placing her hands on her shoulders. "I'm going to go find your dad, alright? Do like we always do and wait up here in case—"

"In case there's anything dangerous on the ship," Jorunn finished, though she didn't seem too happy about it. "I know." And, with that, she sulkily sat down in the grass at the top of the hill, watching her mother run down its slope as fast as she could.

By the time Astrid was at the dock, she could catch snatches of the conversation. It didn't seem as carefree as usual. _Oh no,_ she thought. _The treaty._ If that treaty didn't go through, Berk could be in serious trouble. Still, Astrid knew better than to take the tone of the voices around her as any indication of how things had gone; being married to Hiccup for so long had taught her that. A terrible situation to some was a problem in need of a solution to him, and he always found one. Maybe, if something was truly wrong here, he had already thought of a way to fix it. He had a way of doing that, she knew.

Without being too forceful, she wove her way through the throng of women reuniting with their husbands, children running to their parents, people unloading the ship. Everywhere she went, she looked for that familiar mop of auburn hair that always rose a little above the crowd. She searched the sea of bulky Vikings for the slimmer, taller one with the highly distinct metal leg. Onshore, she didn't see him, so she boarded the ship, squeezing around the men and women hard at work with the unpacking process. He wasn't on deck. She poked her head into the hold. Nothing.

Curious, she made her way back ashore, heading toward another familiar man. "Snotlout," she said loudly, to be heard above the milling group. He didn't seem to hear her, so she grabbed his shoulder. When he turned around, he didn't exactly appear glad to see her. "What's the matter, 'Lout?" she asked, momentarily distracted by the strange, sick expression on his face. "You're looking kind of pale."

He coughed a little. "Seasick," he told her, waving the matter aside.

"Oh. Well, have you seen Hiccup?" she asked. "I can't find him anywhere."

For a long moment, Snotlout stared at her. At his elbow, his wife looked back and forth between them, uncertain as to what was happening. She put a strand of dark hair back into her braid, and Astrid wondered briefly why she looked so apprehensive. Then, Snotlout spoke. "Astrid, he didn't make it."

Astrid blinked at him. "Snotlout, I'm serious," she said.

"I'm serious too, Astrid," he told her, some of the pallor leaving his face as he talked. He took a deep breath, eyes shifting down to the ground. "Hiccup isn't coming back," he said so softly that Astrid almost didn't hear him. But she did, and the second those words worked their way into her mind, no other sound existed outside of the conversation.

She stared at Snotlout, trying to understand what he was telling her. "If he's captured or something, we need to go get him. That's not a problem. I just want to know where he is," she said.

Snotlout pinched the bridge of his nose, clenching his eyes shut and sniffing. "I knew you wouldn't believe me," he said quietly. "None of us would have believed it either, if we hadn't seen him go, right in front of us." When he opened his eyes again, they were sad, pleading with her to realize the significance behind his words. As she looked back, the expression on his face slowly told her everything she needed to know.

She felt her knees go weak, and she had to fight to keep her balance. "What are you saying Snotlout?" she asked. "That he's—that he's—dead?" As soon as she choked out the word, she wondered how she was still standing. "That's impossible. Have you seen how many things he's survived that should have killed him? He can't be dead. He can't be."

Snotlout took another breath, and—was Astrid imagining it?—his eyes looked like they had been touched with mist. "There was a party of rogues," he told her slowly. "They attacked after the signing of the peace treaty. They said that, no matter what their chief did, they'd never align themselves with a tribe led by a dragon rider. The chief of their tribe had them executed immediately, but it was too late. They had already gotten to him." He took a shaky breath, and his wife drew closer, taking his hand. "We burned his body at sea," he told her slowly. Then, after a pause: "He's gone, Astrid. I'm sorry."

He tried to reach out and lay a hand on her shoulder, but she jerked away, eyes burning with angry tears. "He can't be," she said adamantly. "He promised he'd come back." She backed away from Snotlout, shaking her head. "This is a sick joke. Even for you."

"He's not joking, Astrid." Fishlegs approached her quietly, his large hands carrying something close to his chest. When she opened her mouth to protest, he held the object out to her, and she gasped.

Hiccup's shoulder paldron. Complete with the insignia he had developed for himself and Toothless. The worn leather was spattered with blood at the edges.

Astrid's hand shook as it covered her mouth, her mind spinning out of her control. "No," she muttered, voice growing thick. "No."

Fishlegs wordlessly held the piece of armor out to her, looking very close to tears himself. "He was a good man, Astrid," he said. "The best I've ever known."

For a moment, she just stared at the paldron, knowing she should do something but not having the presence of mind to know what. Finally, she reached a trembling hand out and took it. As she pulled it closer, every inch of her body seemed to grow numb. "Hiccup," she said, running her fingers over the leather as a tear slipped from her eye and splashed onto the faded red insignia.

"I'm so sorry, Astrid," Snotlout repeated softly, his wife unconsciously gripping his arm a bit tighter as she watched Astrid through two of the most sympathetic eyes Astrid had ever seen. Fishlegs sniffed a bit and laid a hand on her shoulder in a gesture of comfort and shared grief.

But it wasn't shared. Not truly. Nobody knew Hiccup like she did.

 _Had._ Nobody knew Hiccup like she _had_.

She wasn't sure what to do. No conversation with her mother or Valka could have prepared her for this moment. Not even Hiccup himself could have told her how to behave. Somehow, she managed to nod once or twice and slowly turn away from Snotlout, his wife, and Fishlegs, all of whom felt far too close to her all of a sudden.

On dead legs, she trudged through the crowd, clutching the piece of Hiccup's armor as tightly to her body as she could. She could feel the tears streaking down her face; she could feel the eyes of people slip over her as she hurried past. For once in her life, she didn't care that people could see her crying. All she cared about was the oval piece of leather in her hands.

She had to get away from the throng.

Like Snotlout and Fishlegs had begun to feel suffocating, the crowd was at least a hundred times worse. All the people and all the activity surrounding her were crushing; she had to get out.

She moved as fast as she could, looking nowhere but at the empty space beyond the sea of bodies. The more she walked, putting one disoriented foot in front of the other, the closer she got. Soon, she pushed out into the open air, leaving the people and their stares behind. She didn't stop there.

Astrid kept going, responding to the abruptly overwhelming need to just _get away_. Nothing else even crossed her mind beyond that single mission—a fact for which, somewhere in the back of her mind, she was grateful.

She didn't stop walking until the sun had gone down and the air had grown cold enough to wake her from her daze. When she looked around, she saw that she was on the opposite side of the island. Her face felt tight with dried tears, and, when she unclenched her freezing hands, she saw the paldron. Then, she remembered.

 _Hiccup is dead_.


	2. Chapter 2

_Hello everyone! Thank you so much to all of you for coming back after the way I ended the first chapter! If you're reading this, it means you must have some modicum of faith in me as a writer, and I thank you for that. Keep hanging on! A special thank-you to everyone who reviewed the last chapter-especially those who reviewed as guests. Since I couldn't reply to your review, I suppose I'll just send my mass gratitude to the lot of you. You are all wonderful. Thank you. Truly._

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Hiccup's eyes were heavy and difficult to open, but he managed it after a minute or two; he kept trying to slip back into the thick, hazy sleep that had only too recently lightened its grip enough for him to become aware of it. He expected brightness to assault his eyes the second they opened, but this didn't happen. Instead, he blinked a few times, letting his eyes adjust to the comfortable golden lighting.

For some reason, he felt his hands rise to his chest as if searching for something that wasn't there. They lingered over his heart, which, he realized, was not beating.

All at once, he remembered: the rogues. They had had him cornered, seven of them surrounding the one of him, every one of them armed with some sort of weapon. He had tried everything to stave them off, but even his flame-sword hadn't intimidated them enough. He remembered how, in that moment of pressure, he had used his flame-sword to cut off the head rogue's hand. It had fallen to the floor with a sickening _thump_. So, naturally, Hiccup had been so distracted that he almost hadn't noticed when the superlative rogue had rammed his ax into his chest.

He felt the area where he remembered the blow: just to the left of the sternum, at a slight angle. Nothing. Not even a ridge of scar tissue. His hand moved to his heart once more. Still no beating. With two fingers, he felt the side of his neck, just below the jaw. No pulse.

"Huh," he said. "I guess he actually killed me." Then, with a shrug, he added, "No one can live forever."

As he listened to himself, he grew confused and more than a little concerned. The gravity of what he had just said washed over him, and he wondered how he could possibly be so blasé about this. He was _dead_. He had died. From an ax to the chest. So why didn't that seem like a very big problem?

For the first time since opening his eyes, he looked around.

He was on the ground, beneath an enormous tree. Thankfully, he was clothed and more or less in one piece. He smirked at the familiar sight of his metal leg, giving it a little shake just for good measure. "Good to see I'm not completely crazy," he muttered to himself.

In the boughs of the tree above him, a raven cawed, getting his attention. Quickly, he got to his feet, watching the bird as it pecked at the branch. "Hey there," Hiccup said. "You're a bid bird, aren't you?" The raven crowed once more, almost as if in response, and continued his pecking. After a moment, a heavy, golden orb fell from the branch, landing right in front of Hiccup. He stared at the raven, who cocked his head, staring back. The bird glanced down at the object that had just fallen from the tree and then back at Hiccup. He did this a couple times before Hiccup understood. Slowly, as his body was still feeling somewhat lethargic, Hiccup stooped down and picked up the golden object that the raven seemed to be indicating. He turned it over and over in his hands. "An apple?" he asked the bird. The raven didn't respond, instead just tilting his head again, waiting for Hiccup to do something with the strange piece of fruit.

Slowly, he lifted the apple to his lips and, when the raven seemed to be generally encouraging about it, he took a small bite.

All at once, a newfound warmth and strength radiated throughout his body, imbuing him with the sort of vitality that he hadn't felt in years. He shuddered at the immediacy of it all, but, as the overwhelming wave passed over him, he found that, in its wake, was a sense of total peace and contentment. When he let out the breath he had been holding, he glanced up at the raven. "What _was_ that?" he asked, letting the apple fall out of his hand and land on the grassy ground with a _thud_.

The raven didn't offer anything in response, instead looking at something behind Hiccup. Slowly, Hiccup turned and followed the bird's gaze, and, when he noticed the massive building, his mouth fell open.

It was the mead hall that made every other mead hall look paltry by comparison. The building, with the enormous, pitched roof, windows filled with colored glass, and walls of solid gold, was quite easily one of the most beautiful things Hiccup had ever seen. It sat at the end of a long, heavily-tamped dirt pathway that led straight from the apple tree. The doors were pushed slightly open, and Hiccup could hear a faint sound from inside—the sound of many sounds overlapping one another until nothing was distinguishable. He stared hard, trying to see if there was movement inside, but he saw nothing. Then, the doors opened a bit further, and a figure exited the hall.

In a moment of panic, Hiccup looked around himself for anything amiss. Years of clumsy mistakes had taught him to fear the impending wrath of people who looked as strong as this one. It looked like a man, though that didn't comfort him any. While plenty of women could inflict some serious injury, he knew that their size was at least not a problem. Big, burly men, however…

He instinctively ran his fingers through his hair and straightened his tunic, standing with his tallest, most chief-like posture.

And good thing, too; the man approaching him was a head or so taller than him and about four times his breadth. His beard and eye-patch didn't help either.

"Hugin," The man said, his voice as authoritative as his appearance. At his name, the raven glided down from the tree, flying to land on the man's outstretched—ungloved—fist. Hiccup winced in sympathy as the bird's talons dug into the man's flesh, though the man didn't give any sign of caring. "Go join Munin. Your work is done here," the man was saying. The bird gave one last caw and took off, flying back up the path and straight through the door to the mead hall.

Hiccup's brow knit. "Wait," he muttered. "Hugin? Munin?" Then, he looked up at the man, eyes wide as realization dawned. "Where am I?"

The man's rough face softened into a smile that almost felt paternal. Somehow, with that one gesture, all of Hiccup's apprehension slipped away like fog through his fingers. "Who are—" he tried, but the rest of his sentence got caught in his throat. He made an attempt to cough it clear, but it didn't work overly well. His voice cracked a little as he tried again: "Who are you?"

The bigger man's warm smile didn't falter as he replied, "I am Odin. Son of Bor. Welcome, Hiccup, to Valhalla."

For a long moment, Hiccup blinked at him. It all made sense: the golden apples, the raven, the mead hall, the…the...Odin. But it still seemed nonsensical to him. Like the stories he had heard as a child. Of course he had believed them; even into adulthood, he had believed in Valhalla. But, he realized, accepting that he was actually in the paradise he had only ever dreamt about was much harder than accepting that he was dead to begin with. "Val—Valhalla?" he managed, and Odin slapped a huge hand on his shoulder. When his knees buckled slightly, he was reminded vividly of his father's equally…gentle touch.

"Shall we go inside, then?" Odin asked, and Hiccup nodded weakly. The bigger man gave a low chuckle and led the way to the doors of the mead hall. As they walked, Odin commented, "What a way to leave the mortal world, young chief. I have seen more noble deaths than you can imagine over the centuries, but yours was one to be admired."

Hiccup looked at the ground. "I don't know," he said. "I can barely remember it, but it doesn't seem too special to me."

Odin laughed again. "Of course it doesn't. Not to you, at least. Your heart would not be worthy of this place if you were presumptuous enough to gloat over your own death." They walked a bit further in silence, and then Odin said, "Your memories will come back to you in time. If you do not wish to have them, though, there are ways—"

"I want them," Hiccup said. Then, upon realizing that he had just interrupted a god—the king of all the gods, no less—he immediately cowed. He felt like a fifteen-year-old again, turning in on himself and avoiding eye contact with the incredibly imposing man standing over him. After a second, he felt comfortable again, and he reiterated, "I want to keep my memories. If that's alright, sir."

Laying a hand on the great, golden door, Odin smiled. "Of course you may keep your memories, Hiccup. They are, after all, yours. Now—" Odin gave the door a shove, and it opened smoothly. "Welcome home."

Hiccup couldn't do anything but stare at the mass of people in the hall. There were _so many_. Men, women, even some children wandered around the hall. Most were seated at benches, pulled up to the long, shining wooden tables. There were many with plates heaped with the finest food Hiccup had ever seen, and nearly every single person had a tankard in hand. The spirit of joy was palpable in the air, riding on the laughter emanating from every corner of the vast hall. He looked up at Odin, who smiled down at him. "Go on," he said. "I know some people who would be elated to see you."

Slowly, tentatively, he made his way into the room, scanning the crowd for any familiar faces. It was hard to tell in the delighted melee, and his memories were still very fuzzy, but—

Hiccup stopped dead in the aisle, staring straight ahead at three people sitting at the end of a table. He didn't need his memories to recognize them. "Dad?"

Somehow, over the crowd's noise, the large, red-bearded man heard Hiccup's quiet voice, and he looked up as if he had almost been waiting to hear it. "Hiccup!" he cried, beaming brightly. He tried as quickly as he could to extricate himself from the bench, but his large stature and short legs made it more difficult than he had likely hoped. After a short struggle, Stoick was on his feet, and Hiccup was lifted off of his. "Son!" Stoick's smile was practically audible in his voice as he embraced the smaller man with an enthusiasm that was befitting of a father.

"Dad," Hiccup coughed. "Can't—can't breathe."

In an instant, Hiccup's feet were back on the ground, and, while he gasped a couple of times to regain his breath, Stoick ran an embarrassed hand over the back of his neck. "Sorry, son," he said. "I've—well, I've missed you."

"Aren't you going to let him hug his mother, Stoick?"

From the other side of the table, Valka smiled kindly, and, beside her, Gobber waved. "Welcome to Valhalla, lad! I see you've still got that metal leg of yours."

Hiccup shrugged. "I don't really know who I'd be without it," he said, inching his way around the table's edge and into Valka's waiting arms. "Hi, mom," he said.

She let him go, holding him at arm's length and brushing some of his unruly auburn hair out of his face. "Now we finally have an eternity together," she said, and, before she could say anything else, Hiccup was intercepted by Gobber, who put him into a well-intentioned headlock.

"Good to have you here, Hiccup!" he said cheerily, while Hiccup tried to wriggle free. For being a man with only one hand, Gobber was still very strong, and, even though he was already dead, Hiccup still needed to breathe.

Once Hiccup finally managed to free himself, he smiled around at his family. "I've missed you guys," he said, every word coming straight from his heart.

Behind Hiccup, a throat cleared. He turned, only to see a tall, handsome man with fiery red hair and an unusual expression standing there, poised and regal as a god. Hiccup didn't recognize him, but he also acknowledged that he didn't have every memory at his disposal. To not know him would have been an easy mistake to make. Thankfully, the man didn't leave Hiccup time to ask how they knew one another; he just said, "Hiccup? Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III?"

"Yes?" Hiccup wasn't sure what to make of the man, but he knew his name. That certainly must have meant something. He cast a quick glance around at his family; it was clear from their faces that they all knew the man, though it was hard to discern their opinions of him.

The man took a breath. "You don't know me, but I have known you since before you were born. My name is Loki. Demon of Chaos. If I may, it is quite the honor to finally meet you face to face."

* * *

 _A/N: Me again. Sorry to interrupt your reading! I usually try to refrain from ending author's notes unless I think they're pretty essential. I just wanted to reassure you all that I do know the Norse mythos (quite well, in fact), but, in order for it to work in this world, some creative liberties had to be taken. Please pardon any inconsistencies you may notice between the canons. I'm making a lot of this up as I go along.  
_

 _Congratulations! You've made it to the end of chapter 2 of 10! Stay tuned for more next week!_


	3. Chapter 3

_Thank you to all of you lovely readers who are still with me! Thanks for your trust. Also, a special thank you to everyone who has reviewed this story! I love reviews. If you have an account, I always try to reply. If you review as a guest or don't allow PMs, let me just take a second to say thank you! You are wonderful people. It takes guts to review, and I appreciate every bit of feedback I get. Enjoy chapter 3 of 10!_

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Vali bolted the door shut with a sickening sense of finality. "No, wait!" Jorunn protested, jumping up from her place in front of the fire and rushing toward her oldest brother. "She might come back!"

"Jorunn, no," Vali said, as gently as he could. His sister had been making assertions like this all afternoon and throughout the evening. Now, the sun had long since set, and he was closing the house up for the night.

"But what about mom? She might—"

"If she was coming back tonight, she would already be here," Kory interjected dully from the corner in which he sat, half engulfed in a shadow, sharpening his favorite dagger. Just like he had been all day.

Vali sighed. "You keep grinding away at that metal, there won't be a blade by morning."

Kory didn't say anything, but he shrugged. A second later, Vali hard him mutter something under his breath, though he didn't really want to know the nature of it. Nor did he have time to wonder. Jorunn was doing all that she could to keep from crying, but Vali could tell that she was only barely hanging on. Her lip was quivering, her hands tightly intertwined at her chest.

Vali took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. He was just as nervous as his siblings; in fact, he likely would be getting no sleep all night. But he also knew that, as the oldest, it fell to him to keep the other two calm. None of them had seen their mother since she had left Jorunn to go down to the docks, and it wasn't likely that they would be seeing her at all before dawn. Vali picked up a long metal rod and stoked the fire absently. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jorunn approach him quietly, sitting down beside him. A moment later, she scooted closer. And closer. Soon, they were almost touching.

Jorunn tucked her legs in, hugging them close. "Vali?" she asked quietly.

"Yeah?"

"What if mom doesn't come back?"

Vali was quiet for a minute. Then, he muttered, "She'll come back."

"But what if she doesn't?"

"She will."

"But—"

"Jorunn." Vali turned to her sharply, and she froze, a tear she had forgotten about leaking from her eye. He stared at her a moment before he sighed, calming. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm worried about her too."

Kory mumbled something from his corner, and Vali didn't ask him to repeat it.

He sighed again. "Listen, Jorunn. I'm going to ask you again, and I need you to try to remember, okay? Try really hard." When his little sister nodded, he said, "Did mom tell you anything before she went down to the docks?"

Jorunn thought. Then, she shook her head. "Nothing more than she normally does."

"Nothing about dad?"

She shook her head again.

"Kory."

Kory glanced up from his work.

"You were at the forge today. Did you hear anything from any of the villagers?"

With a long exhale, Kory stood, abandoning his knife and sharpening stone. "Nothing that would have sounded unusual. I mean, I don't remember anything standing out." He crossed the room and dropped down on the other side of his sister, who clearly wasn't holding onto the situation as neatly as she would have liked. "Nobody even mentioned that the ship might be coming back today."

"I didn't think it was supposed to," Vali said, his brow knitting. "Now that you mention it, the ship was a couple days early."

Jorunn buried her mouth and nose in her knees and sniffed, ignoring the tears that tracked down her cheeks. Silently, Kory put an arm around her. "Hey, sis," he said in his kindest voice, "we'll find her. It'll be alright."

"I know," Jorunn squeaked. "I'm not as worried about her anymore. I'm worried about dad." She paused, roughly wiping a tear from her face with the back of her hand. "We've seen Uncle Snotlout, Fishlegs, even Ruffnut and Tuffnut. But nobody's seen dad." Annoyed, she raked her bangs out of her face for the thousandth time that day. And, for the thousandth time, they fell right back in front of her eyes.

"We should really trim those for you," Kory said, giving her shoulder a gentle squeeze.

"No." Jorunn snipped. "Mom always does it. Or dad. Nobody else gets to cut my hair."

Kory waved the situation away and sat, arm around his sister, watching the fire crackle and pop in front of them. After a long moment, Vali stood and went upstairs. When he came back, he had blankets and furs heaped in his arms. "The way I see it," he said, "none of us wants to leave this room tonight." He handed a thick blanket to Kory, who almost thanked him. Then, he gently wrapped a fur around Jorunn's shoulders. She pulled it tight around herself, and Vali sat back down, dragging a black fur into his lap. "But we don't have to freeze," he said. The three of them sat in silence for a while, and then Vali quietly said, "Don't worry. They'll be back."

"Yeah," Kory seconded, though he shot Vali a strange look—one that wondered if Vali kept reassuring them for their sake or for his own. "They probably just got wrapped up in some new adventure. They're always off doing one thing or another."

Jorunn sniffed. "Or, they just wanted some time to be alone together. Dad's been gone a long time, and they have a lot of catching up to do."

Kory and Vali exchanged a mutually squeamish glance at the thought of what _else_ their parents would likely be doing if they had stolen away somewhere by themselves. Vali shook the unbidden thoughts away quickest, though, saying, "Still. It's not like them to go anywhere without telling us. Or, at least telling someone to tell us."

Kory hummed in agreement, idly tracing the pattern of Jorunn's braid with his fingers. Nobody dared to give voice to the ugly thought plaguing each of their minds. Because Hiccup and Astrid couldn't be hurt. They were two of the strongest, most well-known Vikings in the archipelago; it seemed impossible for them to be in any kind of trouble.

But Vali knew it wasn't impossible at all. His dad was missing the bottom part of his left leg, after all. He still remembered with startling clarity the first time he had truly realized that fact. Until then, he had simply accepted the metal prosthetic, understanding that quite a few people of Berk were missing some body part or another. But, one morning, when he had been five years old, Vali had gone to see his parents in their room earlier than usual. Astrid had left already to look after the two-year-old Kory, and Hiccup, his back to the door, had been lacing his right boot. On the bed beside where his father sat, Vali had seen a strange metal contraption. It had appeared familiar and foreign all at once, and, when Vali rounded the corner of the bed, he remembered stopping dead in his tracks.

Hiccup had smiled at him, holding out his arms to his young son, but Vali hadn't rushed into them as he usually would have. Instead, he had stood there, staring, aghast, through huge eyes at the place where his father's left leg ended in a stump, at least a good foot of so shorter than the other. After a second, Hiccup had understood. "Vali, it's alright," he had said gently. "Come here. Look at this." And, right there, before Vali's eyes, Hiccup had taken the metal fixture from the bed and fastened it to his truncated leg.

"See?" Hiccup had reached out for Vali's hand, and, when Vali had slowly given it, pulled him a step or two closer. "What's got your tongue?" he had asked.

"You—" Vali tried. Then, he paused a moment, thinking. "Why do you only have one leg?"

With a small laugh, Hiccup had ruffled his hair, saying, "I've still got most of it. But I lost this little bit a long time ago."

"How long?" Vali had asked. "Were you a kid?"

"Kind of. I was fifteen," his father had told him, the fingers of his left hand absently fiddling with the metallic appendage, touching levers and triggers that Vali hadn't even known about at the time.

Vali remembered hesitantly reaching out and touching the metal in the same fashion, only Hiccup's fingers had been deft and practiced—the kind of touch that knew the metal better than anybody else ever could have hoped to—and Vali's had been purely exploratory. He had never touched his father's metal leg before, and, especially after having seen his leg without it attached, Vali was more than a bit apprehensive. When his fingers had first touched the cold metal, he had recoiled, and Hiccup had laughed a little. Then, once Vali had gathered that it was okay to touch it, he did so again. "Dad?" he had asked.

"Yeah?"

"Does it hurt?"

Hiccup had had to think about that. Then, after a short, pensive silence, he had replied, "Not anymore."

Ever since that day eleven years ago, Vali had wondered about his father's missing leg. He had asked Hiccup many times over the years for a more detailed description of the circumstances under which he had lost his leg, and, each time, Hiccup had given him an elaborate—and completely preposterous—story to explain it away. But Vali wanted to know the real events surrounding such a unique injury, and, every time he pointed out to his father that he knew the stories weren't true, Hiccup had just waved the issue aside. "When are you going to tell me?" Vali had asked, over and over.

"When you're ready to know, and when I'm ready to tell," Hiccup had always replied.

He still looked at his father like he was invincible; the chief of Berk appeared that way to nearly everybody. He had brushed with death enough times for people to assume that, no matter the situation, he would find a way out of it while retaining his life, his safety, and all of his (remaining) limbs. But, even with this idea in mind, Vali had never seen his father as completely invulnerable; Hiccup's missing leg was proof that, no matter how lucky a man gets, there is no such thing as invincibility.

The thought had dropped into his stomach like a pile of rocks almost immediately after realizing that neither his mother nor his father was coming home tonight.

Around him, the air was warm from the fire. Kory and Jorunn had dozed off, though Vali didn't count on them staying asleep for very long. He wrapped himself in his fur blanket and glanced once more at the bolted door, praying to hear someone knock.

Nobody did.

Astrid shivered, the cold air seeping through her furs. Thank Odin it wasn't especially windy; even by the sea, the air was relatively still. The water was flat, like black glass, reflecting the moon with a sad sort of perfection. The entire world seemed to be stopped, mid-breath, almost like it was waiting for something.

Almost like it was in mourning.

Astrid couldn't tell if she was crying anymore. The freezing air had anesthetized her face enough for her to not notice when new tears slipped from her eyes, running down her cheeks. She felt like she was being torn apart—the desire for grief battling with the desire for total numbness.

Slowly, she uncurled her icy fingers from around the leather paldron she had been clutching fiercely since Fishlegs had given it to her back at the docks. _Gods, that felt like eons ago,_ she thought. But, when she looked at the aged, red insignia on the leather, pain slashed through her as fresh and new as a knife across her chest.

 _Hiccup._

She wished she could think something other than his name. Preferably something coherent. But she felt blinded by the wave of emotions that crushed her when she looked at all she had left of her husband. Hesitantly, she raised a shaking hand to trace the pattern that Hiccup had put onto the leather. A fresh bout of tears consumed her as she remembered the day he had first worn the symbol. He had been so quiet about it. Just wearing it on his shoulder like it was nothing. Whenever anyone had asked him about it, he had just shrugged, saying that it was about time he matched his dragon.

Even after Toothless had left, Hiccup hadn't taken it off. Nobody had mentioned it then, though. Astrid had always wondered if the people who remembered the dragons had kept quiet about Hiccup's paldron because they had suspected just how much he had been hurting. It had just been a quiet statement—much like almost everything else in Hiccup's life had been.

She ran her hand over the leather. He had worn it at their wedding. Back when Toothless and Stormfly had still been around. He had smiled so much that day.

His face surfaced in her mind, freckled, framed in truly windblown auburn hair, and smiling the way he had on their wedding day. It was the same smile—the kind that reached all the way up to his kind, green eyes—that she had seen once or twice before in a very unique situation: when they had flown their dragons together. For fear of looking like a total idiot (his words, she recalled), he had tried to hide it from her, but, whenever he had slipped, she had locked the image away in her mind. It was everything she loved about him in one expression. Wonder. Ecstasy. Daring. Freedom. Radiance. Pure, unadulterated joy.

Despite the years, his smile had always made her weak at the knees. Now, her knees almost buckled at the very harsh realization that she would never see it again.

That was how it had been going for her all afternoon. Every hour or so, the truth of what she had been told would hit her like a plasma blast, and she would stagger for a moment, trying to get a stronger grip on herself. Then, she would move on, aware of the situation, but in a far-off sense. Later, it would sneak up on her and surprise her with its ugly, close-up appearance.

Her bones were chilled, and her joints were weary from walking all day long. But she kept moving forward, knowing that, if she pressed on, she would hopefully wind up at the village by dawn. Not that Astrid especially wanted to be around other people at the moment. But she had remembered, sometime between noon and dusk, about Jorunn, sitting on the top of the hill, waiting for her parents to come. She had remembered, also, about her other two children—Vali and Kory. No matter how much the idea of returning to civilization soured Astrid's mouth, she knew that she owed at least that much to her children.

Hiccup's children.

There were parts of him in all three of them. Vali had his appearance, and Jorunn had quite a lot of his personality. Kory had a smattering of freckles across his face that seemed innocuous enough, until he smiled. Then, his father shone through the otherwise predominant features from his mother. All three of them had his compassion.

Hiccup would have argued that Astrid had given plenty of compassion to the children on her own, but it was no secret which one of them hadn't been able to kill even something as deadly and loathsome as a dragon. He had always had the savior's heart. The martyr's heart. The kind that would sooner undergo incredible torment, agony, and pain than see the same things inflicted on a loved one. He had passed that along to each of his children, all of whom, Astrid knew, would go to extreme ends to protect those they loved. Even if it meant putting their own emotions and needs aside for a while.

Astrid wished to Odin that she could do just that.

But she wasn't Hiccup. She would never measure up to him in that way. Nobody could.

For the thousandth time that day, Astrid thought of what it would be like to arrive back in the village. She likely wouldn't talk to anybody, though every person she saw would try to say something to her—things that would all come across as well-meant but ill-executed attempts at comfort. Then, she would finally arrive at her house. She hoped her children had had the presence of mind to go home for the night rather than striking out on their own and looking for her. If they had done the sensible thing, they would be inside the house, nothing but a heavy, wooden door standing between Astrid and the most difficult moment of her entire life.

Many times, she had contemplated just walking past the house without going inside. It would be so easy to simply disappear, leaving the task of telling Vali, Kory, and Jorunn to somebody else. She didn't know if she would be able to tell them anyway; she hadn't even been able to fully grasp the tragedy herself, and she had been walking all day.

Still, something in her—Hiccup, perhaps?—was nudging her conscience in a very uncomfortable manner. It had persisted in doing this until she had finally sighed and resigned herself to the task of bearing the awful news to her children. She knew that, when she arrived at her house, she would have to go inside. She would have to explain to three hopeful, worried faces that their father was gone forever, and she would watch as realization dawned and hearts shattered.

The thought alone was enough to make her wish she had died right alongside her husband.

Vali must have drifted off sometime during the night despite his best intentions. He hadn't realized that he had been sleeping, though, until he was awoken by the sound of pounding on the door. Hastily, before the noise roused his siblings, he scrambled to his feet, grabbing the nearest thing that could pass for a weapon—the metal fire-poker—and going to the door.

He did like his father had showed him and stood behind the door, in a spot that would be hidden when it opened, and tightened his left-handed grip on the poker. It had always been his dominant hand, and he wanted to be able to get a good swing if someone unwelcome was waiting on the other side of the thick wood. Slowly, he unbolted the door, removing the plank that had locked it throughout the night. Then, taking a deep breath and readying the poker for a hit, he opened the door.

Nobody rushed in right away. It took a moment or two before he saw a shadow lengthen in the doorway. As the person moved closer, he recognized the shape and stepped out from behind the door, poker clattering to the ground.

"Mom?" he asked. The woman standing before him was his mother, but to say that she didn't look well would have been a gross understatement. Her eyes were ringed, her lips were nearly white, and her braid was half frozen. She held herself carefully, as though she had the potential to dissolve with the slightest movement. He immediately closed the door, watching his mother intently, worried that she might collapse.

"Let's get you to the fire," he said, wrapping an arm gently around her shoulders and trying to guide her toward the warmth. It had dwindled to embers overnight, but he could stoke it back up in no time. Vali was already reaching for the black fur that had served as his blanket throughout the night; she needed something warm around her shoulders. She needed food. And water. But she didn't move.

Her blank eyes finally found his, and a trembling hand touched his face. It was as cold as a slab of stone. Tears welled in her eyes, and Vali knew something horrible had happened.

"You look just like him," Astrid whispered, voice rasping from the cold. Then, Vali watched his mother collapse to her knees, shaking violently with sobbing.


	4. Chapter 4

_Behold: Chapter 4 of 10! Not my favorite of the lot, but if you've stuck with me thus far, keep going! We're almost halfway there! Y'all are awesome, and I appreciate and love every review! Enjoy!  
_

* * *

Hiccup stared at the man opposite him, his mouth opening and closing a couple times as he tried to settle on some words. Eventually, he managed, "You're…you're Loki?"

The red haired man nodded once, looking far less happy about that fact than he could have been. "Demon of Chaos, wildfire incarnate, god of mischief…take your pick."

"Wow," Hiccup breathed, not wanting to take his eyes from the man in case he vanished.

Loki hesitated an instant before saying, "Hiccup, I hate to tear you away from your family, but I was hoping for a word."

Hiccup turned, glancing at his family, all of whom wore inscrutable expressions. After a moment, Gobber shrugged. "Sure," Hiccup told Loki. Then, to his family, he added, "I'll catch up with you guys in a few minutes."

Loki nodded his thanks to Stoick, Valka, and Gobber before turning, leading Hiccup down the center aisle of the mead hall. "Thank you," he told him. "I know how much your family means to you. Hel, of course I do; I watched you grow up." As they walked, Loki smoothly swiped a tankard of mead from a rather large man sitting near the middle of a table. He handed it to Hiccup without explanation.

Cautiously, Hiccup tasted the beverage, finding that it was in fact quite good. "Uh—what do you mean, you watched me grow up?" he asked, skirting the backs of people and trying very hard to keep up; Loki moved quickly.

After a brief pause, Loki glanced over his shoulder and said, "We all like to keep our eyes on you mortals. Follow me."

Hiccup took a sip from his mug, following Loki somewhat blindly as he wound his way through the crowded hall, moving very much like a man who knew where he was going. Which was good, because Hiccup had no idea. But Loki was fast, and Hiccup had to almost trot to keep up, skirting tables and avoiding collisions with others—all while without spilling his mead. "Hey, uh—Loki?" Hiccup asked.

"Yes?"

"Aren't you supposed to be bound to a rock for all eternity?" he asked, "You know…with the snake—"

"Yes, I know," Loki replied a bit testily. Apparently (and unsurprisingly) that wasn't the most exciting of thoughts. "Bound till Ragnarok and all. But see, Hiccup, things always move in cycles. Several smaller Ragnaroks have already happened. I'm released each time, with the knowledge that I'll be bound again before too long."

"Um…" Hiccup dodged a huge man with an enormous beard who staggered along drunkenly. "I thought Ragnarok meant the end of all things. How can it already have happened?"

"Like I said, Hiccup: smaller Ragnaroks." Loki shot a glance back over his shoulder. "Even Ragnaroks of other worlds. I don't have long—maybe a hundred years of so—before I'm bound again. Your Ragnarok, the total destruction of everything both living and dead, has yet to occur."

"Ah." Hiccup tried not to let on how confused he was. Instead, he asked, "Where are we going?"

In lieu of answering, Loki veered off to the side, sliding neatly between two tables and patting one of the men on the shoulder as he passed. He pulled open an amazingly ornate, golden door, ushering Hiccup through first. Then, before following himself, Loki shot a quick wink at one of the women at the table he had just passed. Hiccup noticed her blush a bit, but the door swung shut too quickly for him to see anything more.

"There," Loki said. "That place gets to be exhausting after a time."

Hiccup was too busy looking all around himself at the gorgeous gold architecture of the hallway to formulate a response. The high, sweeping ceilings were embossed with intricate knotwork, and the walls were draped with shimmering tapestries, each depicting scenes from the lives of various gods. Hiccup gestured to the closest one—Njord, by the looks of it. "Where's yours?" he asked Loki.

With a derisive laugh, Loki waved the question away. "I hope you never find it. In case you hadn't already guessed, it doesn't portray me in the most flattering light."

Hiccup turned to him. "Why does it matter?" he asked.

"Because, Hiccup," Loki said. "As is not the case with most mortals, you seem to have a relatively neutral opinion toward me. I'd hate for it to be shifted in the wrong direction before I'd done anything to earn it."

"So, what you're saying is, you value my opinion of you?" Hiccup clarified, and, after a beat, Loki nodded. "Why?"

Loki's straight, disinterested face cracked into a slight grin, and he said, "That is exactly what I wanted to talk to you about. See, Hiccup, I've been waiting for, quite literally, your entire life to meet you in person. You have no idea just how monumental this moment is to me. I've watched you from the time you were born, and you were always remarkable. I've dreamed for years about your arrival here in Valhalla."

Hiccup knit his brow. "Hold on," he said, trying to make sense of what Loki had just said. "Were you the...like...patron god of my life, then?"

"I suppose you could say that," Loki replied, flippancy somewhat forced. "Though, we gods don't operate on a patron-based system. Nonetheless, we all inevitably have favorite mortals; it just so happens that you were mine." He looked away somewhat uncomfortably, eyes following the elegant curve of the wall all the way up to where it met the other wall, forming a peak at the top. Despite Hiccup's overt stare, Loki did not say anything more.

After a silence laced loosely with tension, Hiccup muttered, "Of course you were. I should have known."

That got Loki's attention, and he turned to Hiccup again. "What do you mean by that?"

"Well, nothing in my life ever really went right, did it?" Hiccup shrugged. "It's just strangely fitting in hindsight that the god of mischief chose me."

Loki gave a little chuckle. "Hiccup, I didn't choose you at all. I just became so intrigued with you that anybody else paled in comparison."

Hiccup folded his arms, a bit defensive. "So you just…played more with my life? Like I was a favorite toy or something?"

"No, no!" Loki was quick to correct him. "It was nothing at all like that!" He ran a hand through his long, red hair, clearly a bit unnerved by the direction of the conversation. "Actually, I was less involved in your life than usual. I was really only responsible for about half of the irksome things that you had to deal with. The rest were, regrettably, your own doing."

For a moment, Hiccup gaped at him, a hundred questions vying for his attention within his thoughts. Then, he found his voice again and said, "Tell me which ones were you."

Loki raised his eyebrows. "That would take quite some time."

"Then give me the biggest ones."

With a sigh, Loki began, "That time when you were a child, and you got lost in the forest—I was moving the trees."

"You were—"

"More recently, when you met Dagur on one of your diplomatic missions—I was impressed with how you handled it, by the way."

"Well—"

"Another big one—the one that, to me, is my best work yet—was that dragon raid when you were fifteen." Loki paused, watching Hiccup's face intently. "You wouldn't have hit that Night Fury if I hadn't nudged your bola just a bit to the right."

At once, all of the words Hiccup had been trying to compile were sucked away, and he was left with a deafening silence in his thoughts. A second later, his mind was bursting again with questions so noisy that he had to work hard to figure out which one he should ask first. He settled eventually, meeting Loki's somewhat uncertain eyes and breathing, "Why?"

"I wanted to see what you would do," Loki told him quietly.

Hiccup couldn't stand still. He paced across the hallway a couple times, trying desperately to organize his thoughts enough to form a coherent sentence, but it was more difficult than he had imagined. "You…you made me do it?" he asked. Then, before Loki could respond, he waved the question away, instead reiterating, "Why?"

"For the same reasons you always fascinated me, Hiccup," Loki said. "I never could predict your course of action." A burst of sound leaked out into the hallway as a blonde man left the mead hall through the door; Loki glared at him, and he immediately went the other way. Then, Loki took a step closer to Hiccup, face softening, and put his hands on Hiccup's shoulders. "The point is, the very thing that made the other gods lose patience was the thing that kept me coming back. Time and time again, I found myself seeking you out, watching you. That's all I did for the vast majority of the time, I swear: just watch." His green eyes bored into Hiccup's, searing his words into Hiccup's mind. "I came to respect you, and my respect is not easily obtained."

"I gathered," Hiccup said, words coming more easily now. His mind still spun, but it was slowing; as he watched the man before him talk, he began to understand more and more of the things that Loki was not saying aloud. So he filled in the gaps. "You threw things at me as a way of testing me. To see if I was worth it."

"Yes, exactly!" Loki pressed. He looked hopefully at Hiccup, adding, "You never once disappointed me."

"Says the trickster whose moral compass doesn't exactly point due north," Hiccup scoffed, some of his sense of humor returning as his shock and resentment diminished. After a second, he added, "I guess I owe you my thanks, then." When Loki looked at him confusedly, he clarified: "For Toothle—the Night Fury. I—ah—I don't know where I'd be without him." He scuffed a self-conscious hand through his hair, glancing away the second at the memory of his dragon—a memory that he had not expected to cause him such an abrupt flood of emotions, especially from beyond the grave.

When he met Loki's eyes again, there was a slight edge of amusement there. Hiccup was only grateful that Loki apparently hadn't noticed the way that losing Toothless still clearly upset him. "You can call him by his name, Hiccup," Loki said gently. "I'll know who you mean."

Hiccup just nodded, repeating the hand-through-the-hair gesture once more, though the sorrow stayed back this time. "Right," he said. "And, by the way, still getting my head around the fact that you've seen my entire life."

Loki smiled. "Most of it anyway," he amended.

"Yeah," Hiccup said. He paused for a long moment, thinking of how he wanted to phrase the idea that his unbidden emotions had stalled earlier; Loki waited patiently until Hiccup eventually took a deep breath and said, "That dragon—Tooth…Toothless—was the best thing that ever happened to me. Thank you. For…whatever crazy impulse made you do it. I—um—I really owe you one." He offered Loki a shy look, and Loki smirked shrewdly.

"I'll remember that," he noted. "Odin knows I find myself in trouble more frequently than…well, than anyone, really. It will be good to know that I've got an advocate in the future."

At the end of the hall, a woman started toward them. She was too far away for Hiccup to see details, but she seemed lovely—dressed all in gold with hair to match and a gait that looked like she was floating on a cloud. When Loki glanced in her direction, however, she stopped, immediately turning around and heading back up the hall.

"That was Freyja," Loki supplied. "Not exactly my biggest fan." He hesitated, glancing around them and lowering his voice slightly. "Watch out for her," he said. "It is not uncommon for her to—ah—make offers to attractive, new men here. If you're not careful, you might find her crawling into your bed."

"That's…that's good to know," Hiccup said, making a mental note to stay as far away from Freyja, the woman in gold, as he could.

"She's beautiful, of course," Loki was saying. "Stunning. Just drop-dead gorgeous. And I have never heard of anybody who regretted a night with her, but—"

"Yeah, I get it," Hiccup asserted. "I'll be, uh, keeping my distance."

Loki looked at him for a second before saying, "Not a bad decision, if you ask me. And I hope you will. Ask me, I mean. If you ever have any questions or concerns, or if you need anything—anything at all—just come find me."

Hiccup nodded. "I will. Thanks." He offered the god a smile, and Loki returned it.

"I should let you get back to your family for now," Loki said. "You've probably got lots to say to them."

"Yeah," Hiccup said somewhat bashfully. He hated to cut the conversation short, but he hadn't seen his father in what felt like eons. His mother and Gobber had kept him company on the mortal plane for a while longer, though they were soon gone as well. He had much to tell them. Valka would want to know all about his children, and Stoick—he would surely ask about Berk. Gobber would probably be the one to ask about him, Hiccup. About his daily life. About the forge. About diplomatic relations, and his marriage, and…

Loki was absolutely right; he _did_ have quite a bit to say to them.

"Well then—" Loki opened the gilt door again, gesturing for Hiccup to go ahead through. Once they were back inside the bustling mead hall, he pointed to a corner on the other side. "They're over there," he said. Hiccup couldn't see them, even when he tried shifting around to get different angles, but when he turned around to ask Loki where exactly he meant, Loki had vanished.

"Oh, okay," Hiccup muttered to himself dryly. "I'll just find them myself. And try not to get lost. Right."

Somehow, he negotiated the crowds, occasionally bumping into a person or two—thankfully, people who were too drunk to be offended. Most everybody in the hall paid him no notice, letting him wander through the throngs without feeling as if under scrutiny. Still, a select few people who had seen him walking with Loki earlier gave him strange, sidelong glances, like they suddenly weren't sure about him and his intentions. He shrugged them off; Hiccup was not unused to soliciting mixed varieties of attention from those who saw him. Still, he couldn't help but wonder if it was his association with the demon that had earned him such suspicion.

Once he found his way back to his family's table, however, their beaming faces were enough to make him forget the way those few people among hundreds had eyed him. He couldn't help but smile when he sat down across from Valka and Gobber elbowed him in the ribs. "What did Loki want with you?" he asked.

Hiccup shrugged, setting down the tankard that Loki had swiped for him earlier. "He just wanted to welcome me to Valhalla," he told them as he lifted the stein to his lips for a swig of mead.

"What was he like?" Valka probed, leaning forward slightly in curiosity.

"Um…" Hiccup scanned their faces; his father's expression was quite befitting of his name, while his mother seemed to be intrigued. Beside him, Gobber was busy nudging his false tooth back into place—it had evidently loosened in its socket. Still, Hiccup knew he was listening. "He was…pretty normal, honestly," Hiccup replied.

Stoick scowled, a reaction that Hiccup had been expecting from him. "Most of the people here don't seem to trust him," he said, eyes roving briefly around the enormous room.

"Rightly so," Gobber mumbled past the fingers that were straightening his tooth. "He _is_ the god of lies and mischief."

"And a demon," Valka put in, though she didn't sound especially perturbed by that fact. Hiccup arched an eyebrow confusedly at her, and she rolled her eyes. "Oh come now," she said. "You all trusted dragons. How much worse could Loki be?"

"Quite a bit worse, Val," Stoick said.

Valka waved their concerns away as though they were paltry. "Have any of you—besides Hiccup—even looked at his face properly? He doesn't have mean features."

"Exactly," Hiccup added, supporting his mother. "He really just is a pretty normal guy. Besides, he liked me."

His family looked at him as though he had just said something incredibly controversial. Very pointedly, Hiccup closed his mouth, focusing intently on the rim of his tankard and tracing it over and over. He didn't look up again until he felt the weight of Gobber's hand on his shoulder. "Making friends right away, eh Hiccup? Seems like a good way to start eternity."

Hiccup smiled at Gobber, relieved that he wasn't being chastised for his rather inadvertent choice in acquaintances. "I really don't think he's a bad person," he told them, though he specifically directed the sentiment toward his father more than the others.

After a second's hesitation, Stoick shrugged. "You're grown up enough to make your own decisions," he said, and Hiccup knew he had at least made some slight progress in dispelling some of the unpleasant ideas surrounding his new friend. "Speaking of which, how is Berk?"

Hiccup didn't know how long they talked, but he covered everything that he had anticipated and more. By the time they had disbanded (with hugs and affectionate punches in the arm), he felt like he had little more to say on virtually any subject and was aching for some peace and quiet.

He didn't know how he found his room; only that he simply wound up at the door after a short period of wandering. Like the tapestries hanging in the hallways, commemorating each of the gods, the gold of his door was embossed in a pictorial representation of his life. Slowly, he ran his fingers over the images, recognizing each instance—from his birth to his death—and recalling it vividly. He traced scenes from his childhood, through his teenage years, and he was about to enter the section devoted to his more recent life when his touch settled on one of the handles. For a moment, he wasn't sure what they were sculpted to portray, but after only an instant, he recognized the long, serpentine figure.

The handles were a pair of Night Furies.

The dragons' heads were at the top, their wings folded and backs arched to form the handle. Then, the tail fused with the door again at the bottom. Upon closer inspection, Hiccup noticed that each dragon was missing its left tail fin.

Somewhere deep in the pit of his stomach, a dull gnawing began. He hadn't experienced this feeling in quite a while, but he knew it intimately and understood. The sensation only grew as he traced over the scenes from his adult life—his wedding to Astrid, the birth of his three children, the final dissolution of the Berk Dragon Academy. By the time he actually pulled the doors open, he was sure he was going to be sick.

He missed them. All of them.

The grandeur of the room itself was lost on him that evening as he stripped down for bed, removing his familiar metal leg and laying it gently on the floor. As he huddled beneath the furs in much the same way as he had done as a child, he wanted to cry. But there were no tears in Valhalla.

He pulled the blankets over his head, wondering why everyone wanted to come to Valhalla if it meant leaving everybody who was still alive. It seemed terribly unfair to him; while living, he had felt this aching for his mother, his father, Gobber—those who all had disappeared so immediately from his life. Now, here he was, in death. He was finally with those whose company he had craved more than anything in life, and he was missing those who still roamed the earth.

For the first time since arriving in Valhalla, he understood why some people living there would willingly give up their memories.


	5. Chapter 5

_Hello dears! Sorry it's been so long. Here's chapter 5 of 10! You're halfway there! Please review if you've got thoughts. I love to hear them, and, alas, I'm not a mind-reader. ;-)_

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Kory crept out of the house early that morning, walking through the village toward the docks. A few people tried to talk to him—likely with the best, most caring intentions—but he ignored them all, remaining resolutely focused on his path. He didn't want to talk about his loss any longer. For a week, he and his family had been subject to questions and various attempts at comfort; he wanted no part of that now.

At the docks, he made a beeline for a specific fishing boat—one he knew quite well. Quietly, he boarded, minding the nets and hooks that lay haphazardly on the deck. "Uncle Tuffnut?" he called. His voice sounded loud in the mists of the early morning, echoing over the water and up the cliffs as he poked his head belowdecks. "Uncle Tuffnut?" he asked again. He got no answer.

With a sigh, Kory sat down on one of the large barrels that was clustered near the bow of the boat. He didn't know why there were so many of them; on a very, very good day, Tuffnut only ever ended up filling half of them. When Kory had asked, Tuff had given him some crazy explanation about having to feed dragons. Kory had rolled his eyes, chalking it up as one of the many bizarre sea stories Tuffnut had a habit of telling him—right up there with the ones in which the Outcasts were enemies of Berk. Everyone knew that there was a treaty between the Berkians and the Outcasts. Just like everyone knew that there was no such thing as dragons.

"Aw, hey kid," Tuffnut greeted as he came down the docks, yawning. "Sorry; overslept." He looked confusedly at Kory. "Wait. Was I supposed to be taking you out today?"

"Um—" Kory hesitated. He didn't feel comfortable lying to Tuffnut, and his visit to the boat was purely spontaneous, with no former agreement between them. "Not really," he said. When Tuffnut narrowed his eyes at him, Kory was quick to add, "My mom won't mind though." _That_ , at least, was the truth; at the moment, his mother probably wouldn't have minded if he had jumped off of the sea stacks.

Tuffnut considered that for a moment, eventually deciding that the kid had a legitimate rationale. "Well, c'mon, then. Let's get moving." He climbed into the boat, setting his pack down against one of the many, many barrels. "Feel like untying us, first mate?" he asked, winking at Kory, who couldn't help but smile a little in spite of everything as he jumped out of the boat and loosed the thick rope from the piling. As Tuffnut unfurled the sail, he leapt back onto the deck, taking his place by the nets. For as long as he could remember, he had gone fishing with Tuffnut. Kory was something of an unofficial deckhand for the typically lone fisherman, and, by now, he knew his jobs by heart.

As they sailed out toward the open water, Tuffnut, from his place at the rudder, called to Kory, "Did I ever tell you about the dragon we found hiding out here in the sea caves?"

Kory smirked at that. Another dragon story. It was no wonder all of his friends thought Tuffnut was a little…well…nuts. "The Thunderdrum?" he replied.

"I guess I did."

"Tell me again," Kory requested, coiling the rope from the dock. No matter what other people said about Tuffnut and his dragon stories, Kory always enjoyed hearing them.

"It's no fun if you already know the story," Tuffnut protested. "Do you know the end?"

"You calmed the two Thunderdrums down, and everything was fine."

Tuffnut shook his head. "There's more," he said, a certain air of dramatic mystery seeping into his tone. Kory always loved it when he talked like this; for some reason, it made him sound like he was closer to Kory's own age. "Your grandpa—the chief of Berk before…" he hesitated. "Before. You know; back in the day. Well, he wanted a dragon to ride, and he had been trying to fly Toothless. You know Toothless, right? Your—uh—the dragon that belonged to—" he cleared his throat. "Yeah. Stoick wanted to fly too, but it wasn't working out with Toothless, so he…" Tuffnut paused. "With the help of—well, see…" He trailed off, never fully articulating that thought.

Kory glanced back at him, dropping the rope coil into the pile of other ropes. It wasn't like Tuffnut to not finish a story—especially one about dragons. But, when he saw the grim, vacant expression on Tuffnut's face, Kory didn't need to ask what was bothering him. It was no secret that there was one name that he had been omitting from the story, and Kory didn't want to talk about him. Not yet.

Neither of them really said much more until they'd gotten far enough out to sea to throw in the nets. Then, once they had both resigned themselves to lazing around on the deck while the nets hopefully did their jobs, Tuffnut glanced over at Kory. "Sorry about the story, kid," he said. "Maybe someday I'll tell you what happened."

From his place stretched out on the wooden planks in the first sunlight of the day, Kory shrugged. "It's okay," he said, and he meant it.

For a minute or two, the pair of them sat in silence. Then, Kory spoke again. "Uncle Tuffnut?"

"Yeah?"

He took a breath, trying to compose the thoughts that had, until this moment, been more visceral than substantive; putting them into words was difficult for him. "I—uh—well, dad and I—right before he left—" He stopped, trying again. "Dad and I had a fight before he left."

Tuffnut didn't say anything, so Kory continued. "I—uh—I didn't say goodbye to him the day he sailed away. I—" He felt his throat tightening with tears, and he fought it as much as he could, choking out, "I was still mad." He sniffed, crossing his arms over his chest and deciding to ignore the way his lower lip was quivering. "I'm afraid—" His voice broke. "I'm afraid he hated me when he…when he…"

Kory couldn't hold the tears back any longer, and he clenched his eyes shut, pressing the heels of his hands into the sockets. His eyelashes were wet, sticking to his face when he pulled his hands away again and blinked. He hated crying in front of people. Even Tuffnut.

"You know what, kid?" Tuffnut said. Kory could have sworn he heard a thickness to his tone that sounded like sorrow. "I knew your dad. Sure, he could be really controlling and…annoying. Like whenever we'd fly, and he'd never let me and Ruff go anywhere alone, 'cause he thought we'd cause some kind of natural disaster." He scoffed a little. "I mean, we always _did_ , like that time with the forest fire. Or the time with the avalanche. But, to be fair, it was totally not our fault. What was I saying?" He thought for a second and apparently remembered, because he continued more somberly, "Oh yeah. Your dad. Sure, he had bad parts. But one of the best things about him was that, even if his knowledge of everything else was, frankly, kind of nebulous, that guy knew how to forgive."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." Tuffnut rolled onto his stomach, picking at loose splinters in the decking. "Gotta redo this wood," he muttered absently. Then, to Kory, he said, "Yeah. He—uh, Hicc—Hiccup never stayed mad for long. He always…moved right on ahead to the next thing. So, I guess what I'm saying is, I can promise he wasn't still mad at the end." He sniffed, wiping his nose on the back of his hand, and Kory realized that a tear had slipped from his eye and was trailing along beside his nose. "Yep. That guy really knew how to forgive. And how to fix a broken Zippleback wing. He knew that too."

Kory watched Tuffnut for a moment, wondering if he would be upset if he put a hand on his shoulder or something. Not that Kory especially wanted to; more than anything, he wanted to cry alongside the older man, and, before he had a chance to stop himself, he was doing just that. Neither of them said anything to comfort the other, but both simply let the tears come, dampening the wood beneath them with dark speckles.

Some time later, once both of them had dried of tears that had long been withheld, Tuffnut stood, rubbing his face dry with his sleeve. Then, he held out a hand to Kory. "C'mon, first mate," he said, a bit of his natural humor returning in his barely-perceptible smile. "Let's bring these fish in."

Kory took Tuffnut's offered hand, pulling himself to his feet; together, they began to haul the nets in. "One more thing," Tuffnut said between grunts as they pulled on the nets. "How's your mom?"

As they heaved the mass of squirming fish over the side of the boat, Kory sighed. "Not good," he admitted. "She stays in her room a lot. When I walk by, I can hear her crying." He knelt beside Tuffnut, who had begun extricating fish from the net and tossing them into barrels. The routine was so rote to both of them by now that the work felt idle. "Vali is trying hard to be strong, I think. Jorunn's a mess. You know how much she loved dad."

"Yeah," Tuff agreed.

After a moment, Kory added quietly, "I miss him too." He got up and opened a second barrel for them to fill with fish.

"I'm sure you do. I mean, he is—was—your dad."

"I think," Kory said, settling back down beside the net, "I'm worried about mom." He looked up at Tuffnut, eyes imploring. "You're her friend, right?"

Tuffnut looked back, a tiny bit of wariness in his expression. "Yeah…?"

"Could you—" Kory caught a fish that had slipped away and stroked its slimy scales distractedly while he said, "Could you talk to her?"

For a moment, Tuffnut didn't reply. Then, once the net was almost empty, he said, "Sure, kid. We'll figure something out. Now, let's get this back in the water." And, together, they threw the net over the side of the boat again.

"We need to call an emergency Berk Dragon Academy meeting," Tuffnut said as he closed the door behind him.

Ruffnut glanced up at him from her spot by the fire, watching the pot of soup as it cooked. "There _is_ no Berk Dragon Academy anymore, stupid," she told him.

"I know," Tuff replied. "But it was quicker than saying all our names."

Ruffnut rolled her eyes. "Well, who do you want to call? Because Hiccup's dead and nobody's seen Astrid." Something in the set of her jaw told Tuffnut that those two facts had been hard for her to hear—especially in her own voice. Even still, she didn't dare express such a thought. Tuffnut knew his sister; if she showed her grief, she would drown in it. So she didn't let it show.

Quietly, Tuffnut sat down beside her. "Listen, Ruff. This is important," he said as gently as he could. He understood all too well how badly she was hurting from this loss. As they had grown older, she and Astrid had become closer—an inevitable fact, really, considering that they were the only two women in their age bracket. Astrid had enlisted Ruffnut's help during her wedding preparations. Ruffnut had been present for the birth of each of Astrid's children (if only for squeamish moral support). Even if their viewpoints didn't always align, they still went to one another for advice on occasion. Being her brother, Tuffnut had watched all of this happening in Ruff's life, and the news of Hiccup's death had hit her hard. For Ruffnut, though, it was a twofold pain: sorrow over the loss of a friend, and also worry for the friend who was left behind to mourn her husband.

Finally, Ruffnut sighed. "Alright. I'm going." And, with that, she dragged herself up from the floor and out the door.

Tuffnut waited in the silence left behind, stirring the soup on occasion. It had been much easier to call emergency Academy meetings when there had been Terrible Terrors to carry the messages. With the dragons gone, however, they had to do this the old-fashioned way: knocking door-to-door. It had been fifteen years since the dragons had faded into the stuff of myths, Tuffnut recalled, yet he couldn't quite forget them the way that the others had. He would always know his friends as the Berk Dragon Academy trainers, though, without Hiccup, he couldn't deny that the title felt borrowed. Something within him told him that this would be the last time he used it.

It wasn't long before Ruffnut returned, this time with Fishlegs and Snotlout, both of whom looked very concerned; Tuff guessed that Ruff had referred to this gathering as he had, the resurrected collective sending up all sorts of red flags to those who knew what it actually meant. To those, Tuffnut mused, who knew that the Berk Dragon Academy had been real in the first place.

"What's going on, Tuffnut?" Fishlegs asked.

"Yeah," Snotlout put in. "Ruff said it's serious."

Tuffnut nodded as they all sat down together around the fire. Ruffnut pulled out some bowls, and they all helped themselves to the soup. "I—uh—I went fishing with Kory today," he said significantly.

Snotlout shrugged. "So? You go fishing with Kory all the time."

"Yeah," Tuffnut allowed, "but today was different. He just kind of…showed up at my boat. He didn't look good, guys."

"I'm sure," Fishlegs noted sadly. "He's been going through a rough time lately."

"That's what he wanted to talk about," Tuffnut explained. "He wanted to ask me something about—about Hiccup. But that's not what I need to tell you."

"Then what is it?" Snotlout pressed. Everyone knew he had suffered from the loss of his cousin, no matter how much he tried to hide it. He and Hiccup had never been the best of friends, but they had loved each other in their own unique way.

"I'm getting there," Tuffnut said.

"Well, hurry up. You said it was important."

With an exasperated sigh, Tuffnut cut his story short. "Kory said Astrid's not getting any better," he relayed. At that, every set of eyes around the fire was suddenly fixed on him. "She—well, she doesn't leave her room. He said he hears her crying a lot. He's actually worried about her."

"Kory?" Ruffnut interjected. "Kory, the thirteen-year-old who doesn't like anybody except you?"

"Yeah," Tuffnut reiterated, glancing around at his friends.

"That could be a problem," Fishlegs said. "If _Kory_ says something's wrong—"

"Exactly," Tuff stated.

Snotlout leaned forward, getting their attention. "Did you talk to Vali about this?" he asked.

Tuffnut shook his head. "But Kory said that Vali's not doing very well either."

"Of course he's not," Fishlegs put in. "He just lost his dad, and his mom's crying in her room all day. He's—he's the man of the house now." A look of abrupt realization lit Fishlegs' face, and he muttered, "Oh no."

"Oh no?" Ruffnut repeated. "What's 'oh no?'"

"Well," Fishlegs began, "without Hiccup, someone's got to lead the tribe. I mean, we've just been lucky this past week or so; getting by without a distinct leader won't always be so easy."

For a moment, the only sound was the fire crackling as they all considered this, the weight of the situation dropping inside them uncomfortably. Then, everybody's gaze shifted slowly, settling on Snotlout.

"What?" Snotlout said. "I'm not next in line. Maybe when Hiccup was single, but—"

"Oh no," Fishlegs said again. When everybody's heads swiveled around to look at him, he said, "It's obvious isn't it?"

"Obviously not," Ruffnut replied, a clear edge of her old sarcasm finding its way into her tone.

"Well," Fishlegs began, "remember when Hiccup and Astrid got married? They made that agreement. You know—the one that says that, until their oldest child is at least seventeen and capable of leading the tribe, if anything happened to Hiccup—well—" He paused. "It's Astrid, guys. She's chief now."

Snotlout ran a hand over his face as he—along with the others—attempted to process this. "This is great," he said dryly. "Especially considering she hasn't left her room in a week."

Fishlegs shrugged. "Maybe she just needs a reason to do it. I know when my parents died, the Dragon Academy was the only reason I left the house." He glanced around at his friends, the people who had helped him—knowingly or otherwise—through that difficult time. "Maybe she just needs to know that she's got people depending on her."

Ruffnut was staring idly into the flames when she nodded thoughtfully. "Astrid's never backed down from a challenge," she noted.

They all considered this, each of them warring silently with the idea; this would either be the best thing they could do for Astrid, or it would be the cruelest. Asking her to just pack her emotions away and move on from such a devastating loss—that felt terribly heartless. But Berk needed a chief, and, for the time being, she was it.

Eventually, Ruffnut stood. "I'll tell her," she volunteered stiffly.

Tuffnut looked up at her, watching the tension in her expression. "She'll probably talk to you," he agreed, though he felt very conflicted about it.

Snotlout and Fishlegs eyed them without saying anything; they could see the wordless discussion occurring in a glance between the siblings—something that they hadn't noticed until Ruffnut and Tuffnut had grown into adults. When Tuffnut looked away, gaze drifting back into the flames, Fishlegs gently said to Ruffnut, "You might want to go ahead and do it tonight."

Ruffnut nodded, looking very much like she was steeling herself for something more like a battle than a conversation between friends. She didn't speak as she strode to the door, though her hesitation at the handle whispered volumes. Then, with a single, forceful yank, she had the door open and disappeared quietly into the night.


	6. Chapter 6

_Thank you to everyone who's reading still! I keep seeing people favorite and follow this story, which is awesome! Thank you. :-) I love reviews, if you have any thoughts. I also reply to my reviews when I'm able! Also, I had someone PM me this past week and ask if they can request a story. The answer was yes, of course! If you have an idea that you'd like me to write, PM me, and we can talk!_

 _Chapter 6 or 10! Enjoy!_

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It was difficult to get any sleep in Valhalla. Not because it was too noisy or too crowded or too irksome; in fact, it was quite the opposite. But, even after the months that Hiccup had spent in the majestic hall, he still was having difficulty falling asleep at night. His bed was warm, comfortable, and quiet, but, as nice as it all was, Hiccup wasn't used to sleeping alone.

This particular night, he lay awake, staring at the ceiling and remembering the first time Astrid had ever fallen asleep beside him. They had been young then—only about sixteen. It had been a summer night, not too long after they had faced the Flightmare dragon that had done some serious damage to the Hofferson family's reputation years before. Astrid had been very quiet as she snuck into the dragon stables, but Stormfly hadn't ever been very good at stealth. In her excitement to see her rider, she crowed loudly, waking Hiccup from the stall across the aisle, where he had been asleep against Toothless' warm flank.

"Astrid?" he had asked, blinking a bit blearily.

She'd stiffened to hear him; Hiccup supposed that she hadn't anticipated finding another human in the stables at this time of night. When she turned around, he'd half expected an ax in his face. But, strangely, she appeared to be unarmed. "Hiccup?" she replied. "What are you doing here?"

Hiccup yawned and stretched. "I could ask you the same question. I'm here because my dad has a cold and his snores are so loud that you can almost hear them from the dock. Did he wake you up too?"

"Yeah," she said, ruffling her bangs a bit sleepily. "Yeah, that's it."

Hiccup nodded. "Well, it's nice and quiet down here. Plus, the dragons are comfy. You could stay a while."

She looked back at Stormfly, who seemed all too pleased with the idea of her rider snuggling up to her for the night. "Yeah…yeah, I think I will," Astrid said.

"Okay," Hiccup said, standing groggily. "C'mon, Bud," he told the half-asleep Toothless, who warbled noncommittally in response.

"Where are you going?" Astrid asked.

Hiccup shrugged. "Probably the cove. It should be pretty quiet there too. That is, if the twins haven't gotten there yet. If my dad's this bad tomorrow, I might have to talk to Gothi about getting some kind of sedative so the whole island isn't kept awake."

"Oh." Astrid stroked Stormfly's nose absently. "I didn't mean to chase you off."

He waved the matter away as though it was nothing at all. "Don't worry about it. Just try to get some rest." He smiled at her as he opened Toothless' stall door, beckoning the dragon to follow him.

"Hiccup?"

"Yeah?"

For a moment, Astrid hesitated. Then, she said, "You don't have to leave."

He paused at the door, and Toothless mumbled impatiently. "Are you sure? I mean, I wouldn't want to be in your way or keep you up or—"

"I'm sure," she said. Decisively. "Please stay. You won't keep me up. Unless you snore like your dad."

"I don't," he replied quickly, shoving Toothless back from the semi-open door. "Or…at least, I _think_ I don't."

"I'll tell you in the morning," Astrid returned with a small grin that was followed closely by a yawn. In her stall, Stormfly lay down, her lids drooping. Astrid sat on the ground beside the Nadder, leaning up against her neck. Across the aisle, Hiccup was doing something similar with Toothless, though the Night Fury seemed a fair bit put out for having been woken up only to be told to go back to sleep again.

Once Hiccup finally managed to convince Toothless to lie down, he settled in himself. "Goodnight, Astrid," he said, his voice carrying in the otherwise quiet stable. He barely heard her say goodnight in response before he succumbed to the dense lethargy of sleep.

Hiccup wasn't sure how long he had been sleeping before he heard something that brought him partway out of his fog. It sounded like his name. "Hmmm?" he muttered, trying to get his eyes to focus in the dark.

"I'm sorry," the voice said again, and he was able to place it. Astrid. He blinked a couple more times, and her shape materialized out of the hazy blackness. She was inside Toothless' stall. "I'm so sorry. I should just…I should go."

"No…Astrid," he slurred. "Wha's up?"

"It's stupid. I'm sorry…I…"

Hiccup managed to sit up a little more. "Astrid, wha' happened?"

He saw her deflate a bit, and, when she spoke, her voice was smaller than he had ever heard it before. "I lied. It wasn't your dad that woke me up tonight. It was…it was the Flightmare."

At that, Hiccup woke up the rest of the way. Before he could jump to his feet, though, Astrid said, "No, no…he's not back. Not for real, at least. It's just…I see him every night when I go to sleep. I can see that horrible face, smell his breath…"

"Are you sure you're not thinking of Tuffnut?" Hiccup asked, only half-joking.

She looked scathingly at him. "This is serious, Hiccup. I haven't been able to sleep since it happened. Gothi gave me some medicine to help, but…sometimes, it just doesn't work."

Hiccup watched her fold her arms protectively around herself, too frightened to sleep but too tired to stay awake. Cursed to fall asleep out of necessity, only to be greeted by the Flightmare's glowing, sharp-fanged grin as it sprayed her with paralyzing venom. "Is there anything I can do?" he asked.

"I…I don't know," she said. "I've tried everything I can think of on my own" She hesitated, one of her boots scuffing across the dusty ground. "Part of me wonders if…if…well, maybe…"

Even though she stumbled over her words, Hiccup caught her meaning. With a warm smile up at her, he said, "There's plenty of Toothless to go around, if you don't mind sharing."

Relieved, she smiled in return—wearily, but genuinely. "Thanks," she said as she lowered herself to the ground by Toothless' wing, a modest distance separating her and Hiccup.

Neither of them fell asleep right away. Instead, they both sat there, leaning against the slumbering Night Fury and very intently avoiding one another's eyes. After a moment, Astrid said, "Hiccup?"

"Yeah?"

"May I…would you mind if I got a bit closer?"

For a second, his breath caught in his throat. Then, he managed to reply, "Of course not," and Astrid scooted very shyly toward him. She stopped, looking at him cautiously. "You can come as close to me as you'd like, Astrid. I promise I won't bite," he told her, ignoring the way his heart was pounding unsteadily in his chest.

She moved toward him even more, and now their legs were touching.

"Please tell me if I'm making you uncomfortable at all, Hiccup," she said, slowly lowering her head onto his shoulder. "I wouldn't ordinarily do this; it's just…I'm exhausted. I don't even know if it'll help. But it's the only thing I haven't tried, and—"

"Astrid, it's okay," he told her in what he hoped was a reassuring tone. He thought he sounded composed, at least, which was more than he felt. All he could think was that his shoulders were very bony; Astrid would probably wake up with a headache after a little while like this. So, he did the only thing he could think of and shifted his arm up and over her, his hand landing gently on her back. He was more than a little surprised when she didn't recoil at that; instead, she shifted closer, curling up against his side and letting her head fall to his chest.

They sat like that for several long moments, Hiccup's heart slowly stopping its acrobatics and Astrid's breathing deepening. She was almost asleep when she murmured, "Hiccup?"

"Yeah?" he replied quietly.

"Thanks."

Now, Hiccup lay in his huge, luxurious bed that was a far cry from the straw-floored stall of his memories. Every part of him craved the innocent weight of Astrid's head on his shoulder, her warmth tucked snugly against him. He had missed it every day that he spent sailing away from home, but at least, before, he had always been able to say how long it would be before he would hold his wife in his arms again.

With a sigh, he flipped the fur blankets off of him, getting out of bed. He dressed, hoping that he wouldn't run into anyone he knew tonight; he really didn't feel like talking.

As he left his grand suite, he ran his hand over the doors, wishing he was touching the real memories of his past rather than just the depictions that were etched into the gold. He wanted to feel the vibration of metal as he hammered it out in the smithy. The sting of the wind on his face as it blew through Berk from off the water. The way each of his children's hands felt in his own. The silken texture of Astrid's hair as it slipped freely through his fingers. The cool smoothness of Toothless' scales.

His hand fisted, falling to his side as he turned away from the door.

Without looking back, he walked away from his room, choosing a direction arbitrarily and trying to think as little as possible. He had learned the labyrinthine halls quite well during his short time in Valhalla; he walked them almost every night.

This time, though, he wasn't paying any attention to where he was going. His feet seemed to be wandering of their own accord, taking whichever turns they so desired and simply carrying him along for the ride. He was far down one of the more secluded pathways—further than he had ever gone that direction, in fact—when he passed a room that made him stop. Hiccup stood in the archway, staring into the antechamber.

It looked very much like a cave, set right in the middle of the enormous, palace-like mead hall. Or, rather, as though the mead hall had been built around the cave. The walls were stone, with tall rock formations sprouting up from the ground and others dripping down from above. Mosses clung to almost every available surface, small patches of green giving color to the otherwise grey cave. From the far wall, a spring bubbled out, pooling neatly at the base. It appeared to be bioluminescent. At the edge of the pool sat a red-headed man that Hiccup recognized immediately.

"Hey Loki," he said.

"Hello Hiccup," Loki replied, glancing up from the pool for a moment before turning back to the water again.

It was so quiet in the cave; the only sounds were the trickling of the water, the dripping of the rock formations, and the lingering echo of their spoken words. Still, Hiccup had to ask: "What are you doing?"

The corner of Loki's mouth twitched up into a grin. "Come see."

Hiccup crossed the stone floor—wincing a bit at the loud _clang_ of his metal foot that rang out every other step—and stood beside the god, looking into the pool. He had to blink a couple times. "Is that…is that Breakneck Bog?"

"Yes," Loki replied. "Quite colonized, as I'm sure you see."

Hiccup _could_ see. Within the pool, several dozen Vikings moved about, all headed toward their homes for the night. "I guess, since the Smokebreaths left, there's no reason to stay away," Hiccup mused. He had never known that there had been any people in Breakneck Bog. Even as chief of Berk, with the Bog being so close to their island cluster, Hiccup had never heard a single peep from the people there.

As if Loki had heard his thoughts, he said, "They're peaceful; don't worry. Boring, but peaceful." He sighed, folding his arms and leaning back against the cave wall. "I keep checking in on them, hoping that they might decide to stir things up a bit, but they never do. They lack conviction."

Hiccup was still staring, mesmerized, at the people in Breakneck Bog when Loki reached down into the water and stirred it with his hand. The image ruptured, and, as the water began to still, another formed in its place. "What is this?" Hiccup asked as Fireworm Island appeared in the pool.

"A window, of sorts," Loki told him. "We use it to keep an eye on you mortals." He looked down at the image, watching as a fishing boat landed on the island, dropping the anchor in the shallows for the night. "Smart men," Loki commented, indicating the boat. "Why waste time sailing to the fishing spot in the morning when you can moor there overnight? The early fisherman catches the cod, as it were." Then, to Hiccup, he continued, "There is almost always one of us watching the spring. Someone to hear prayers and guard the mortals. We can look at anything. Sometimes, we can even alter things, too." He illustrated this point by reaching down into the water, pinching the image of the fisherman's anchor—which surprisingly responded to his touch as though it was solid and not just a reflection—and moving it over to the other side of the boat.

Hiccup watched as a fisherman came up to the top deck and noticed very confusedly that the anchor had swapped sides. Loki chuckled to himself. Then, he switched the anchor back to the correct side of the boat while the man's back was turned. "I could do this all night," he muttered. Then, to Hiccup: "Some people are more fun than others. This boatload seems like they could be interesting, at least."

Loki paused, drawing his hand from the water and flicking the excess back into the pool. "The Old Man with the Eye Patch wouldn't want me to be showing you this stuff," he said. "I personally would love to tell him where he could go shove it, because, for any given rule, there is at least one scenario that calls for its being broken." He looked at Hiccup. "What had you wandering the halls tonight?" he asked.

Hiccup shrugged, ruffling a hand through his hair. "Eh, the usual," he said. "Rough adjustment period, I guess."

After a long moment, Loki said quietly, "You miss your family."

"Yeah," Hiccup disclosed. It was hardly a secret that his memories, though he had chosen of his own free will to keep them, plagued him frequently. Hiccup even suspected that some people who knew him may have taken bets on how long he would go before he finally broke down and asked Odin to take his memories away. Wipe the slate clean. Valhalla was supposed to be a happy place, after all. Free of all worry or care. Hiccup hadn't worried once since he had been in the golden hall, nor had he cared. He simply longed, and sometimes that was worse than either worry or care.

He almost didn't notice Loki reach into the pool again, swirling the water. Once it had settled, Loki looked up at him. "Would you like to see them?" he asked.

Before Hiccup could reply, his eye was drawn to the water. The city of Berk was reflected there, in a broad, overhead view. He came over to the edge of the pool, finding his house. After a glance at Loki, who nodded once, he reached into the water and touched his house. Almost instantly, the image closed in on the building he had touched, coming in closer so that nothing else was visible. He touched it again, and the view tightened, allowing him to look through the roof at the inside of his home.

Each of his children lay fast asleep in their beds. He wasn't sure how long he stared at them, watching as they shifted or muttered in their sleep. It could have been a few seconds; it could have been an eternity. He didn't care. He could stare at his children forever.

They were all so beautiful. If Astrid was there, she'd have said that they all looked like him. He, however, thought they all looked like Astrid. They all had something unidentifiable within them that made them—at least in his opinion—breathtaking to look at. Just like their mother. There was a ferocity that roiled behind their eyes, even level-headed Vali's. Hiccup couldn't even pretend that such a trait came from him. He had watched each one of them grow, turning more and more into the adults that they would eventually become, and he had watched the younger iterations of them fade until only he and Astrid remembered them. He reached through the water toward where Jorunn slept, her blonde hair a tangled mess on her pillow. What he wouldn't have given to be able to brush it back from her face one more time.

"Hiccup?"

At the sound of her voice, Hiccup found Astrid in the image before him. She was in the room that had once been theirs, sitting up in the bed that they had once shared. Her knees were drawn up to her chest. "Hiccup?" she whispered again. "Can you hear me?"

He so badly wanted to whisper back. To tell her that, yes, he could hear her. Instead, he glanced up at Loki. "Can she…"

The god shook his head sadly. "I'm afraid she won't hear you. You can talk to her, though. I don't mind."

Hiccup nodded shakily, turning back to the pool. Astrid was staring right up at him. He had never thought he'd see those blue, blue eyes again. "I don't know if you can hear me, Hiccup," she was saying. "I don't even know where you are. I hope you're in Valhalla. You have to be in Valhalla." She raked her hair back from her face, and Hiccup saw the purple circles under her eyes. She hadn't been sleeping either.

"I miss you," she said, her voice trembling. "I miss you so much. I…I hope you're happy where you are, because I don't know if…I don't think I could keep going if I thought you were unhappy." She hesitated, and he saw the first tears spill over her eyelids. "The kids miss you," she said. "Jorunn keeps telling me I'm wrong and that you're still alive somewhere, just trying your hardest to get home. No matter how many times I tell her you're gone, she just won't believe it. Kory…Kory's been really quiet. He doesn't want to talk. He doesn't want to do anything. He spends a lot of time at the forge or out fishing with Tuff, but I don't think he does it because he wants to. I think it's more an effort to leave the world behind for a time. Like when we used to go flying."

She scrubbed at her nose, sniffing. "Remember when we would get lost for hours above the clouds? When there was nothing but the two of us, our dragons, and the cold air?" She scoffed to herself. "And you'd try that stupid wingsuit, and I'd want to kill you—if the fall didn't do it first. I'm sorry I never told you how impressive I thought it was—your wingsuit. All the rest of us rode dragons, but you…you could fly."

She sniffed again, continuing. "Vali's trying so hard to step up and be the man that you were. He keeps saying he's fine, but I see him when he doesn't think anyone's looking, and he's not fine. I think he just needs to give himself time to mourn. But I don't think he will. Especially not because I'm acting chief at the moment. Vali knows that he's going to have to take the role from me sooner rather than later; he knows that it was always meant to go straight from you to him. I wasn't ever supposed to be doing this. We both know I was never much of a politician."

"That's the truth," Hiccup muttered, though he smiled fondly down at her. He wished he could cry along with her. But tears didn't exist in Valhalla.

"I'm doing my best," she said. "Thanks to the golden age you started, there hasn't been much need for a chief other than to kind of keep things afloat. That's all I'm trying to do. Every time I need to make a decision, I just ask myself what you would do, and things have been going pretty well. I'll keep this up as long as I need to—until Vali feels like he's ready to take over. I don't want to force him into anything. But he's shadowing me, just like he used to shadow you. He's such a smart young man, Hiccup. You would be so proud of him right now, if you could just see him."

She sighed, wiping the tears from her cheeks. "You know, it's funny. I used to be afraid of crying. I used to think it was a show of weakness. But now, I do it so often that I can't afford to think that way." She paused. "I love you. I love you so much, babe." Her voice broke as she whispered, "I hope that, wherever you are, there are dragons. Let them keep you busy until I come to be with you. If you can hear me, then goodnight, Hiccup. Don't party too hard without me."

With that, she turned over onto her side, nestling herself deep within the furs. Hiccup realized with a pang that she still only used her side of the bed.

"I love you too," he said quietly, reaching through the water toward her. And, gods, that was the truth. To himself, he muttered, "What I wouldn't give to be with her."

Beside him, Loki cleared his throat softly, getting Hiccup's attention. When he looked up, the god's golden eyes were somber. "Hiccup…I might be able to help you," he said carefully, and Hiccup got the sense that Loki wasn't supposed to be doing whatever it was he was offering.

"How?" he asked, glancing back at the pool—at Astrid—and deciding that Loki's actions were his own, and if it helped him stop hurting, Hiccup was interested.

After a second's hesitation, Loki replied, "We gods have the rather unique ability to…transport people and things from one realm to another. The Old Man doesn't like it, of course, but then, he doesn't like much of anything that doesn't involve becoming hopelessly inebriated in that mead hall of his."

Hiccup blinked at him. "Are…are you saying that you could…that you could bring her here?" he asked. "That you could bring Astrid here to Valhalla? Or, better yet, send me back there?"

"Yes and no," Loki told him. "Unfortunately, I cannot send you anywhere that is home to the living. You see, the living and the dead can't coexist. I could, however, bring your lovely wife here to you." He considered Hiccup's expression. "But, unfortunately, the rule does not change. You see, I could bring her here, yes, but then she would be communing with the dead. And that would mean…"

"You would have to kill her," Hiccup concluded. Loki only stared back, face entirely neutral. For half a second, Hiccup considered it. Then, that crazy half-second ended, and he said, "No." He was sure that his voice was firmer than a frozen pond in the middle of winter, and possibly as chilly.

Loki just nodded as though he had assumed that Hiccup would respond as he had. "Very well," he said. "I just thought I'd offer." He swirled the water in the pool idly with a finger while he asked, "Is there anything else you might like to have, then?"

A shape in the water caught Hiccup's eye. "Where are we looking now?" he asked, and Loki turned to the pool as though he hadn't noticed it had changed since Berk.

"Oh, this. This is Folkvang—Freyja's field."

"May I?" Hiccup asked, approaching the pool.

"Be my guest."

Hiccup knew what he had seen in the swirling waters a second ago, and, with shaking hands, he searched the beautiful, pastoral field for any sign of it. After a moment, he stopped. "There."

He felt rather than saw Loki come stand behind him, peering over his shoulder. "Everyone and everything in Folkvang is already dead, correct?" he asked the god, who replied that, yes, they were. Hiccup backed up, pointing at the water. "Then I want him."

Inside the pool, a Night Fury with half a tail played with a butterfly, chasing it about and batting at it with his paws.

Loki gave a knowing smile. "Your dragon." Hiccup nodded. Briefly, Loki thought about the request. Then, he sighed. "It is never an easy thing to persuade Freyja to give up that which is hers. She's very proud and protective—quite jealous for her possessions. It would be far easier to just snatch someone from the mortal plane, but…"

Hiccup held his breath.

"…in this one, specific circumstance," Loki said, "I'll see what I can do."

* * *

 _Yay! Is this the beginning of a turn from heartbreaking sorrow to that happy ending I promised waaaaay back in chapter 1? You'll just have to tune in next week to see. ;-)_


	7. Chapter 7

The weather was changing around Berk. Slowly, the people of the island started to leave their homes after the months of icy, frigid weather. It was still cold, but it was a few degrees warmer than constant hypothermia, which meant that the Vikings were moving about more. The fishermen started those long-delayed projects of refurbishing and resealing their boats. The lumberjacks shouldered their axes and headed out to the forest. If the dragons had been there, they would have been playing in the icy-snowy slush—an image that Astrid remembered vividly as she walked through town.

It had been almost six months since Hiccup had not returned from his voyage, leaving her as chief. She didn't claim to be any good at the chiefing thing, but it definitely gave her something to occupy her during the daytime. Living without her husband had grown routine, and anyone looking at Astrid would have praised her on her progress toward healing; she alone knew, though, that the routine was nothing other than numbness.

She still missed him. Every day.

"Hey, Astrid!" Ruffnut said as she passed her. "You seen Tuff anywhere?"

"No," Astrid replied. "Have you checked his boat?" She glanced toward the docks, looking for Tuffnut's fishing vessel—never difficult to find, what with its red and green striped sail that featured a Hideous Zippleback painted in bold, brazen orange.

Ruffnut sighed. "Yeah I did. Duh. It wasn't at the docks." She rolled her eyes, as though Astrid had asked her the most inane question imaginable, even though the number of times Ruff forgot to check her brother's boat was about equal to the number of times she remembered.

With a shrug, Astrid replied, "Maybe he's out fishing."

"Nah," Ruff said. "I haven't seen Fishlegs either today. I think they both might be out together. You know, doing their—" she lowered her voice and cupped a hand around her mouth, lest anyone try to read her lips "—dragon-searching thing."

"Do they really still do that?" Astrid asked. She remembered back when the dragons had first begun to vanish, they had all gone out on Tuffnut's boat to try to locate them. Vali didn't know it, but he had been with the group as a baby on several of their earlier voyages. Shortly after, Astrid had deemed the effort futile. As heartbroken as losing Stormfly had left her, she simply couldn't justify spending days on end searching for dragons that had left of their own volition and clearly didn't want to be found. Hiccup had continued the journeys for a long while, but, shortly before Kory's birth, he had given them up in favor of being at home with his family and his tribe. Slowly, they had all fallen out of the pattern of dragon-searching, but, on rare occasions, Fishlegs and Tuffnut—the last of the hopeful among them—had continued the search. They'd disappear for a day here and there, often spaced out with months in between. But, if the mood struck, they'd both be gone, chasing after a memory that may as well have been a dream.

"Yeah, they still do it sometimes," Ruffnut said. "I don't think Tuff knows I know, but I know. You know?"

Astrid smiled a little, private smile. "Yeah, I do," she told Ruff, who smiled back.

"Oh, by the way," Ruffnut said, as though it had nearly slipped her mind, "Your kids are all in the Great Hall. They told me to find you. Apparently, they want to show you a thing they found or talk to you or something. Maybe both. Dunno. Go ask them. I'm gonna keep looking for my idiot brother."

Astrid waved goodbye to her friend as she huffed her way through the village, asking everyone she encountered if they had seen her twin. Then, Astrid turned, heading up to the Great Hall. As she walked, she let herself wonder what her kids were up to. No doubt they had found that old shield-portrait that Bucket had painted ages ago, in which Hiccup was depicted as a larger, more muscular young man than was the reality. She grimaced, remembering that whole fiasco. Still, if her children asked, she would gladly explain. They story did, after all, have a happy ending.

Or maybe they found the peace treaty that Berk had drawn up with the Outcasts fairly early on in Hiccup's time as chief. They had stopped all the fighting a good while beforehand, but Hiccup had (wisely, in Astrid's opinion) wanted to secure the truce on parchment, just in case something shifted in their balance. Since the kids had never known the Outcasts to be anything other than peaceful with the Berkians, she reasoned that they very well may have questions about that.

She had run through plenty of scenarios in her head during her trek up the hill to the Great Hall, but, when she opened the huge doors, she hadn't prepared herself to see her three children clustered around a table, their heads bent over a book. She recognized it immediately. The Book of Dragons.

"Mom!" Jorunn called as Astrid entered the Hall. Calling a smile to her face, Astrid approached them, ruffling her daughter's hair a bit. "Mom, look what we found!" Jorunn proclaimed, displaying the open book to her mother as though it was a brand new artifact. A discovery that had never been found before.

They didn't know that over half of the images and text in the book had been put there by their father.

Vali shot Astrid an apologetic glance after his little sister's excitement. "We—" he gestured to himself and Kory "—were playing with Jorunn, and we stumbled onto this in one of the back rooms." Kory nodded beside him, silently corroborating his story. A look of confusion clouded Vali's face as he continued, "We were wondering if…well, if you could tell us what it is."

For a moment, Astrid didn't speak. All three of her children looked expectantly up at her, and she debated telling them that she had no idea what that book was. But then she remembered the way Vali had smiled so broadly when Hiccup had introduced him to Toothless that she'd thought his little face would burst. Judging by the look on his face now, he remembered none of it. And, she reasoned, why would he? He had only been a baby. By the time he'd turned two, all of the dragons had disappeared. It hurt her to see him looking at her, now going on seventeen years old and entirely unaware of his own beginning. So she calmly sat down between Vali and Kory, pulling the book in front of her.

"There were dragons when I was a girl," she said, tracing the outline of a Snaptrapper lightly with her fingers. "There were sky dragons that nested on the cliff tops like gigantic, scary birds. Little brown dragons that hunted down mice and rats in packs. Huge sea dragons that were twenty times the size of a whale and who killed for the fun of it."

Her children were all staring at her, wide-eyed and likely wondering why she had neglected to mention this for their entire lives. Still, she continued. "There were Monstrous Nightmares and Hideous Zipplebacks. Gronckles and Night Furies. Terrible Terrors. Deadly Nadders." She closed the book and lightly patted its thick, leather cover. "They're all in here. Everything we knew about every dragon we knew of. It wasn't nearly as full when I was young, though. The Book was originally compiled by a man named Bork—an ancestor of ours. He practiced a lot of dragon observation, as I understood it. Every entry in the Book contained a summary of the dragon—its defenses, its weaknesses, its jaw strength, its habitat—followed by the warning 'extremely dangerous; kill on sight.'"

She glanced around at her children's faces. "We used to kill dragons here on Berk," she said.

Jorunn gasped. "Not you though, right Mom?"

"Oh I certainly would have killed dragons," Astrid told her. "I was one of the best fighters of my generation, and, had it not been for your father, I probably would have become the next dragon-killing prodigy."

"What did Dad do?" Kory asked, breaking his quiet and folding his arms on top of the table.

Astrid smiled to herself. "Your father caught a dragon."

Jorunn gasped again.

"It wasn't just any dragon though," Astrid said. "It was a legendary Night Fury. Said to be the unholy offspring of lightning and death itself. Quicker than a lightning strike, quieter than a ghost, with a hide of pitch black to match the night sky. Nobody had ever seen one before, much less captured one. Your dad was determined to be the first. And he was.

"We were all of fifteen when it happened," Astrid explained. "About to enter Dragon Training, where we would learn how to kill dragons and earn our place as members of the Hooligan tribe. One night, during a dragon raid, the whole village was busy fighting off the attacking Nightmares, Nadders, Gronckles, and Zipplebacks…nobody noticed your dad sneak off. See, he was determined to prove himself because nobody really respected him very much—"

"But he was the son of the chief," Vali interrupted.

"True, but we were dragon killers then. For all your dad's virtues, he just wasn't the kind of thing that the tribe was looking for."

Kory scoffed. "Then what were they looking for?"

Astrid paused, thinking. "Well…basically, your uncle Snotlout." This earned a giggle from Jorunn and a grimace from Kory, who didn't much care for his uncle. "Anyway, no one's really sure _how_ he did it, but your dad shot a Night Fury out of the sky that night. When he came back to the village, though, nobody believed him. See, he kind of had this…habit of thinking he'd caught a dragon without actually…well…catching one. The number of times we'd heard him tell us that he'd caught a Night Fury…well. It's no wonder nobody believed him."

"But he wasn't a liar," Jorunn asserted. Then, a sliver of uncertainty touched her expression. "Was he?"

"Oh no," Astrid said. "Not at all. See, every time, he had genuinely thought he'd hit a Night Fury. It's just that, this time, he actually had." She hesitated. "He didn't describe the events that followed the dragon raid to me until almost a year after they'd happened," she mused. "I mean, we all saw the effects of what had happened, so we filled in the cause. But this is how he told it to me.

"He was walking through the forest the morning following the dragon raid, absolutely certain that he'd hit a dragon. Knowing your dad at that age, he was probably grumbling about how he'd somehow managed to misplace an entire dragon in the woods. But, no matter how much searching was involved, he found it. He looked over a hilltop, and there it was: a hulking mass of black scales and leathery wings, all twisted up in his bola. The thing was completely helpless. Barely breathing, he said. And, because we were a village of fierce dragon-killers, he drew his knife."

Jorunn shifted nervously beside Kory, who stared hard at his mother, waiting for her to continue. On her other side, Vali held his breath. Astrid wondered if, somewhere deep within her eldest, a memory stirred. A memory of an enormous black animal with lamp-green eyes and wings that could carry him up into the sky, beyond the clouds.

"Any of the rest of us would have plunged that knife straight into the dragon's heart without a second thought," Astrid continued. "And your dad had definitely intended to so the same." She sighed, running a hand over the worn cover of the Book. "I really wish you had been able to hear him tell this story. He's much better at it than me. And this is pretty important to him. To all of us. I want to do it justice."

Kory's brow knit. "Why did Dad-the-Storyteller never tell us about this, anyway?" he asked. "I mean, he had at least ten years."

Astrid looked reproachfully at her son, who shrugged moodily. She had to admit, as much as she understood Hiccup's reasons for withholding the story of the dragons, Kory was entirely justified in asking. "Some stories…some stories are too painful to tell," she said quietly, looking at each of her children in turn. They looked back, confused but sobered.

She took a breath and continued. "Anyway, your dad did something that no other Viking had done before him. He cut the ropes and set the dragon free."

Astrid wasn't sure what she had been expecting from her children upon getting to this part of the story, but she had expected… _something_ , at least. During the dragon-killing days, this turn of events would have caused an uproar, complete with weapon-brandishing and an awful lot of shouting. Even after the dragons had become commonplace on Berk, the story would have still at least elicited a gasp. But now, her three children just sat there, looking at her as though she hadn't quite gotten to the punch line of a joke and was expecting them to laugh at the setup. They all looked utterly unsurprised. Astrid wondered if they even believed a word she was saying; up until now, they had all thought dragons to be the stuff of myths and legends. A favorite subject of bards. A mere creative, imaginative construct of artists. Dragons, to them, were not real creatures. And, even if they _were_ following the story and taking Astrid on her word, one would have done the same to almost any animal. It just wasn't usual to slay an innocent creature in cold blood.

Not now, anyway.

With a sigh, Astrid cracked the leather-bound tome open, flipping a few pages until she got to the Mystery Class of dragons. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jorunn lean over and whisper something in Kory's ear, to which Kory muttered back, "I dunno. I'm not really sure _why_ she'd make it up, but that book…it's not the kind of thing someone could fake." She ignored them, trying also to ignore the way her face had started burning indignantly. She was sure her ears had gone quite pink by the time she found the page she was looking for.

"There," she announced, and her kids all drew closer, looking at the book laid out on the table. "The Night Fury."

For a second, they were all quiet. Then, Vali murmured, "Retractable teeth? Wow. And it really could shoot lightning?" he asked, looking at Astrid.

She shrugged. "We never really knew what it was. Hiccup called it a 'plasma blast.' The point is, it caught things on fire."

The children pored over the pages again with increased fervor. "…can tell its age by looking under its chin?" Kory mumbled, and Jorunn made a face. They both looked at Astrid to corroborate this, but she only shook her head.

"I don't know about that one," she said. "I knew Toothless pretty well, but—"

"Toothless?" Vali asked, looking at the drawings on the page. Slowly, he lifted his hand to trace one of them lightly. "I…I think I've heard that name before."

Astrid smiled sadly. "You have. It was the name of your dad's dragon. His Night Fury." She watched as Vali's eyes lost focus and he drifted away, back into his memories, trying to conjure up anything related to the name 'Toothless.' To the images on the pages in front of him. "You met him. We even took you flying a couple times, when you wouldn't stop crying. Nothing too high; just low and slow, around the village once or twice, and you'd be happy as a Gronckle in a quartz mine." When her kids all turned, looking at her blankly, she added, "Read about Gronckles sometime. Or ask your uncle Fishlegs. You'll get it."

Kory pointed at the page in front of him. "You said dad had one of these?" he asked, disbelief coloring his tone.

Astrid nodded.

"How?" Kory asked. "I mean, this isn't your everyday kind of pet. Not like a sheep or a yak. This thing…this thing could kill you if you weren't careful."

"It absolutely could," Astrid confirmed. "Lots of good people lost their lives to the dragons. But your dad…his story doesn't end with him releasing the dragon that he shot out of the sky. See, he actually trained the dragon. Named him Toothless, because of his retractable teeth. He built a saddle and a prosthetic tail for the dragon—the left half of his tail fin had been torn off when he'd been shot down—and, after a little bit, he actually rode that thing." She gestured to the Book, at the picture of the Night Fury that Hiccup had drawn in himself. Her kids were all gaping at her, round-eyed. "And they were something to watch, too," she noted wistfully. "I mean, all of us were good, but nobody could beat Hiccup and Toothless. If they were racing, you were basically in it for second. If they were doing battle, you'd be better off retreating. They really were a sight to behold, cutting through the clouds like a warm knife through yak butter." She shook her head, dragging herself out of the cloudscape of her memories and back into the present, in which her children were all staring at her silently.

Finally, Kory piped up. "You expect us to believe that?"

"Yeah…" Vali muttered. "It really is kind of fantastical. Vikings riding dragons? It sounds more like a bedtime story than actual history." He scuffed a hand through his hair in a way that never failed to remind Astrid of Hiccup. Behind Kory, Jorunn was quiet, but Astrid could see that she was siding with her brothers on this.

With a groan, Astrid closed the Book of Dragons, concluding that it wouldn't be much help at the moment. "Have any of you ever wondered why Berk is built the way it is?" she asked.

None of them replied, only looking at each other, confused.

"You've never been the least bit curious about why things in Berk are so enormous? Why all the buildings are huge and open? Why there are those tall platforms and troughs situated randomly throughout town? Why we have so many buildings that look perfectly functional but clearly haven't been used in over a decade?"

They all stared blankly at her.

Astrid sighed. "I wasn't making anything up. Everything I'm saying to you is entirely true. I would stake my life on it, I swear to Odin. When your dad showed everyone—including _his_ dad, your grandfather, chief Stoick the Vast—that dragons weren't necessarily bad and that they could be trained, the whole village was rebuilt to accommodate dragons. For a long, long time, we were the only known village in the Archipelago in which dragons and Vikings coexisted and cohabitated. We still have the feeding troughs, the dragon perches, the landing platforms, the fire prevention mechanisms, the stables, the dragon wash…even the shell of what once was a medical clinic for dragons." She looked importantly at each one of them. "You walk past this stuff every single day, but you don't think anything of it because you live here. It's just part of the atmosphere. It blends into the background. But ask any visitor from any other village—Berk is weird. There's no other place that I know of that's built like this, and we didn't just do it for aesthetics."

For a long, long moment, all of the kids were silent. They all appeared to be considering what Astrid had said, trying to come to terms with such a wild, unlikely story. After what felt like several hours, Vali said quietly, "What kind of dragon did you ride, mom?"

It took a few beats for his words to sink in, but, when they did, Astrid couldn't help but smile. They believed her. "I rode a Deadly Nadder named Stormfly," she replied. Jorunn pulled the Book of Dragons over to her and, with Kory's help, found the correct page.

"Wow," she said. "What a pretty dragon."

"Oh, she really was." Astrid fingered the pendant around her neck—a gemstone that Hiccup had brought back from one of his trips that was the precise color of Stormfly's scales. "And you had to tell her, too. Nadders were extremely proud; you had to flatter them regularly if you wanted them to like you." Her kids chuckled, and Astrid smiled. "It was amazing, having the dragons here. It really was like living in a bedtime story—only it was all real."

Jorunn hesitated, chewing a hangnail nervously. Then, she asked, "If it was as amazing as you say it was, why didn't you tell us about it before?" She didn't quite look her mother in the eyes, and Astrid could see the pink creeping into her daughter's cheeks. She knew that Jorunn never liked to speak her mind like that. She was always afraid she'd upset somebody. Astrid reached behind Kory and took the girl's hand.

"It's alright, Jorunn," she said. "I'm glad you asked."

"Yeah, because nobody in the village ever talks about dragons," Vali put in, backing his sister up.

"Except Uncle Tuffnut," Kory added, and Vali nodded. Then, Kory's face lit with realization. "Wait. This means that all of Uncle Tuff's crazy dragon stories…they're all…true?"

Astrid laughed. "Well, mostly. Tuff likes to embellish things." She gave Jorunn's hand a squeeze. "The reason we don't talk about the dragons is because…well, because they left us," she said simply, but even saying it aloud scratched at old wounds in Astrid's heart that she had thought to be completely scarred over. "They were our friends, and we were happy, and all was right with the world. Until they all just…went away one day." She sighed. "For a really long time, we all expected them to come back— _hoped_ for them to come back. Your dad hoped harder than anyone. He prayed, he searched, he kept the food troughs stocked…but he never saw Toothless again. None of us ever saw any dragon again."

She paused, looking at her children. "We don't talk about it because it was sad. We're afraid that, if we mention it, then we might hurt again like we hurt then. Call us cowards if you will, but we had completely changed our way of life in order to make room for the dragons. And we didn't just squeeze them into the corner. We threw the doors wide open to them. And, for a long time, life here on Berk was something that people only ever dream about. Then, just like that—" she snapped her fingers "—it was over.

"We all lost our best friends that day," she continued. "Nobody knows why the dragons left. Why they all vanished like mist on a sunny day. All we know is that the village population was halved overnight, and all of a sudden, it was quiet again. And it was so, so lonely."

She felt Jorunn's other small hand close over their conjoined ones, and, when she looked up, the little girl was crying.

"Your dad's whole meaning and identity was wrapped up in those dragons. He had single-handedly changed the _world_. His name was already written down in the annals of Berkian history; he had been a living legend since he was fifteen years old, and it was all because of the dragons. Throughout the Archipelago, people called him 'Dragon Master' and 'Dragon Whisperer,' and people climbed over each other for the opportunity to meet him and shake his hand. So, of course, it makes sense that losing the dragons hit him the hardest."

She paused and drew a shuddering breath, willing herself not to cry in front of her children. Vali put a hand on her shoulder, and Kory looked down thoughtfully—solemnly.

Still, she continued. "I don't think any of you had ever seen your dad cry. Thank Odin for that. Because your dad crying is the most heartbreaking thing I have ever seen in my entire life. But, for weeks, he cried after the dragons went away. Never in public; it was only ever when he was alone or when he was with me. He'd wake up in the middle of the night sobbing in the dark, because when it's dark, it's much harder to distract yourself from your own thoughts, and I'd hold him and cry too, until we both just fell back to sleep like that." She pushed her bangs out of her face, taking a deep breath and steadying herself. She had never described the ache of losing the dragons to anybody before, and she could have gone on for hours if she had been inclined. But she was also very glad to be concluding: "So that's why none of us talks about the dragons."

Nobody spoke. A heavy, grave silence had fallen over them, punctuated only by Jorunn's sniffs as her tears slowed. Astrid leaned over to her and wiped the tears from her cheeks with the furs on her arms. Then, Vali said, "Well, I don't blame you." Kory nodded, and Jorunn sniffed again.

"Sorry," Jorunn muttered. Kory reached back and mussed her hair a bit to cheer her up.

Astrid smiled just a little—a ghost of a smile, really, but a smile nonetheless. "Now you know, at least," she said, standing up from the table. Her children followed her lead, the long benches scraping as they pushed them out. "Bring the Book. If you're interested, boy have I got some stories for you."

The four of them headed toward the doors, Jorunn cradling the Book protectively in her arms.

"Mom?" Vali asked. "How did dad lose his leg?"

Astrid smiled, brushing her bangs out of her face and then doing the same to Vali's. "That is another story for another day," she said, taking Jorunn's empty hand and thinking of a couple trunks back at the house that were currently each storing a disused leather saddle—and, in one case, a number of prosthetic tailfins. "For now, let's go home. There's a couple of things I'd like to show you."

* * *

 _Chapter 7 of 10: done! Bonus points to anyone who caught the reference to the "How to Train Your Dragon" books by Cressida Cowell. If you haven't read the books, you really ought to. They're delightful. They certainly stole my heart, anyway. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for chapter 8 next week!_


	8. Chapter 8

_Chapter 8 of 10! Almost there!_

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"Once, when I was a boy, my father told me—"

"Oh here we go," moaned Gobber.

"—to bang my head against a rock, and do you know what happened?" Stoick looked around himself at all of the faces within earshot, some of whom he knew, but most of whom he didn't.

Hiccup sighed. "You knocked yourself out." He and Gobber exchanged a glance, coupled with some discreet eye-rolling.

Stoick plowed ahead as though he hadn't heard them. "That rock split in two," he said, as though it was the most serious and important fact in all the world. There came a few _oohs_ and _ahhhs_ from those around them, but, to Hiccup, the story was just one that he had heard a thousand times growing up.

"Right," Hiccup said, leaning forward on the table and facing the listening crowd. "And _my_ father told me to kill a dragon."

To his left, Valka chuckled. "Yes he did, didn't he? And we all know how well _that_ went!"

Stoick, Gobber, and Hiccup both joined her, laughing at the sheer irony of it all. In fact, it was quite funny when laid out like that, Hiccup thought. He had never really considered it before, but now…

Slowly, they quieted when they realized that nobody else at the table was laughing with them. When one of the spectators said, "Well did you kill it then?" Hiccup realized that most of these people hadn't been around for the Berk Dragon Revolution (as Astrid had termed it early in Hiccup's chiefdom).

He cleared his throat. "It's…it's funny because I have, well, never killed a dragon." The people around him just looked confused. "Instead, I trained—you know what? Never mind." He could tell by now when a joke of his had fallen flat.

As one of the other Vikings at the table piped up, saying, "Oh yeah? Well _my_ father told me—" Hiccup quietly excused himself from the table. His daily efforts at making friends in Valhalla had failed. Again.

It had surprised him initially when so few people in Valhalla actually knew about what he had done with the dragons. As much as he didn't like to say so, he had been quite famous while alive. He could hardly go anywhere in the Archipelago without people taking notice. Though when he actually thought about it, most of the residents of Valhalla had been dead for hundreds of years before the Dragon Revolution, so he reasoned that he shouldn't have been exactly shocked. Some of them didn't even know about the dragons at all. The more he talked to people, the clearer it became to him that the most triumphant years of his life were his alone to remember. Even his father hadn't seen the best parts of the dragon years. Valka had seen more, but she had missed the beginning. Only Gobber truly had known Hiccup before, during, and (briefly) after. But it was no fun to tell stories to someone who had been there to witness them in the first place.

What he wouldn't have given for one foreign chief—one fallen warrior of a nearby island—even one solitary person who would appreciate the single most important thing in his life.

As he walked the perimeter of the mead hall, he almost stumbled over a tankard that had been knocked to the ground and overturned in a moment of revelry. He kicked it dejectedly with his metal foot, watching it tumble lopsidedly across the floor. Sometimes, he wondered why he had to be so _different_.

He thought briefly about going to find Loki ( _he_ knew what it was like to be a little bit overlooked), but then he remembered that Loki had been gone for weeks. He wasn't quite sure where the god had gone, and neither, it appeared, was anybody else. Initially, he had asked around about his friend, but it had soon become clear that those few who cared didn't know and everybody else just didn't care. Some people were even quite glad to be rid of the crafty redhead, as his absence meant an end to the itching powder in their knickers or the frogs under their pillows.

Hiccup sighed. He could hardly blame Loki for turning to cheap mischief, as, without it, life in Valhalla was incredibly boring. It was all fine and good if one was content to arm-wrestle the day away with huge, burly individuals who existed perpetually in varying states of drunkenness. But Loki, like Hiccup, preferred to pass the time in more—ah— _artistic_ manners.

About halfway through one revolution of the enormous room, Hiccup heard the doors bang open. He thought he heard someone yell his name as he turned to look at what was going on.

Before he could fully register what was happening, a giant mass of black leapt over the table in front of him and tackled him to the ground. It wasn't until the forked, pink tongue started licking him up and down the entire length of his body and he said (completely out of habit), "Aw c'mon Bud, you know that doesn't wash out!" that he realized.

He blinked a few times. "Toothless?" he said, the name almost sounding foreign to his ear.

In response, the dragon pinning him to the ground opened his bottle-green eyes and warbled happily.

For half a second, they just stared at each other. Then, Toothless started rubbing his head so forcefully against Hiccup's side—in what he must have thought was a sweet little nuzzle—that Hiccup was scooted a bit across the floor.

"I'm happy to see you too, Bud," Hiccup said, laughing. He threw his arms around the dragon's thick neck and let Toothless pull him to his feet. His dragon looked up at him with huge eyes that brimmed with joy. In fact, Hiccup noticed Toothless' whole body wiggled a bit in his elation.

"He practically ran me over to get inside," said a voice at Hiccup's shoulder. Loki stood, the annoyance in his tone offset by the smile in his eyes as he watched Toothless reach his paw up to bop Hiccup on the head. "But, here he is: your one-of-a-kind, genuine Night Fury."

Hiccup smiled, scratching Toothless under his chin. Then, turning to Loki, he asked, "How can I ever pay you back for this?"

But Loki waved it away. "Hiccup, it's nothing," he said.

"No really," Hiccup persisted. "That's twice now you've given me this dragon. I may not have gotten to thank you for the first, but this…" he looked at Toothless, who leaned into his side affectionately. Hiccup hadn't felt this happy—this _full_ —in quite a long time. "What can I do?" he said to Loki. "Just name it. I can't let this go unrecognized."

Loki rolled his eyes. "Now you're just talking like a chief," he said with a grin. But after a second, he added, "I'll remember what you said. I don't need anything at the moment, but…how about you owe me a favor?" Something impish glinted behind his golden eyes, and Hiccup remembered sharply with whom he was dealing. The god of mischief was a wily, slippery thing, who had a knack for cashing in hugely on his bargains.

Maybe it was the overwhelming contentment that laid over Valhalla like fog. Maybe it was the cool, sleek feeling of his Night Fury's scales under his fingers. Whatever it was, Hiccup didn't care. "It's a deal," he told Loki, holding out his hand.

The god shook it. "One favor then," he said, and Hiccup nodded.

Once Loki let go of his hand, Hiccup asked, "So…where were you? I mean, you were gone for weeks."

"I was in Folkvang, getting your dragon back," Loki replied.

"For _weeks_?"

"Yes. One day traveling to Folkvang, a day and a half traveling back—" he looked at Hiccup. "It takes longer to travel when one's got an enormous black reptile to wrangle along the way," he explained. "—and, between that, twenty-six days of persuading Freyja to let me take him."

Hiccup just gaped at him.

With a shrug, Loki reminded, "I told you—she's jealous for her possessions. I'm lucky to have gotten him at all. As it turns, she was quite fond of him."

After a moment—in which Hiccup consciously instructed his facial expression to look more neutral and less…well, stupid—Hiccup asked, "What did you have to do to get her to give him up?"

"It's better that you not know," Loki returned with a wince. "Let's just say that I'm not looking to ever repeat it." At that, Hiccup winced too.

A huge hand clapped onto Hiccup's shoulder, and from behind him, Stoick boomed jovially, "Son! You found Toothless!" Valka had already moved past Hiccup to greet Toothless, crouching down to his level and holding out her hand for him to sniff.

Hiccup looked up at his father. "He actually just showed up a few minutes ago," he said. "My friend Loki—" But he trailed off, because, when he went to gesture to the god, Hiccup found that he had vanished.

"He looks right as rain," Gobber noted, taking in Toothless' gummy smile at all the attention. "All except for…well, the tail." And Gobber was right. The dragon unsurprisingly was missing the left half of his tailfin.

Hiccup looked around Toothless' long flank at the tail. Unlike Hiccup, who had come into Valhalla with his prosthetic leg, Toothless was completely contraption-free. "I guess I'll just have to whip up another tail for you, huh Bud?" he said to the dragon, who made a noise that very closely resembled a purr, resting his head solidly against Hiccup's chest.

Valka smiled at her son. "It looks like not even the afterlife could keep the two of you apart," she said, reaching out a hand and mussing Hiccup's hair gently. "Why don't you show Toothless around a bit?" she suggested.

A sidelong glance at the astonished faces that watched from nearby tables told Hiccup that taking Toothless on a little tour might actually prove to be quite fun. Halfway across the enormous hall, a huge man with a blonde beard dropped a full tankard of ale when he turned around and saw the enormous reptile. The rest of the room had already gone rather quiet.

Hiccup grinned to himself. "I don't think most of them—" he jerked his head at their captive audience "—have ever seen a Night Fury before. What say we go introduce ourselves, Bud?"

Toothless howled an affirmative, and Hiccup waved goodbye to his family as he led the dragon once around the mead hall, enjoying the shock and awe that followed them, and then down the nearest hallway. Together, he and Toothless meandered through the endless halls of Valhalla, stopping occasionally for the important landmarks along the way: the kitchens, Hiccup's quarters, the wine cellar, the curious cave-room with the magical spring. After several hours of walking together, Hiccup and Toothless rounded a corner and almost collided with another very large individual.

"Oh my—" Hiccup stammered, "I'm so sorry, Odin. Sir. I was just taking a walk with Toothless, and…I'm sorry. I—"

To his surprise, Odin interrupted his apology by laughing. "Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third!" he exclaimed, laying a paternal hand on the smaller man's shoulder. "I hope I didn't startle you!"

"Erm…" Hiccup had been very startled indeed to nearly run headlong into the Allfather himself. But he said, "No, no. Of course not. Sorry. It was my fault. I wasn't paying attention."

Odin shrugged it off, instead turning his eye to Toothless, who had sunk low to the ground in something like a bow. Clearly, Toothless understood that the man before them was quite important. "And who is this?" Odin asked, surveying the Night Fury.

Hiccup rocked back and forth once on his feet like he used to do as a child when his father had been about to scold him. "This is Toothless. He's my dragon."

"Hmmm," Odin said. Then he caught sight of Toothless' lopsided tail. "What's this?" he asked, gesturing to the place where the left tailfin should have been.

"He was shot out of the sky," Hiccup explained, "and it injured him. By the time I found him, the damage had been done. He can't fly anymore. Not without a tailfin and a rider."

Odin's one eye turned somber. "I've always pitied a winged creature whose gift of flight has been forcibly taken from them," he said.

Hiccup nodded. "Yeah. Me too." Then, a thought occurred to him. "Erm…Odin?" he asked.

"Yes, my boy?"

"There wouldn't happen to be a forge anywhere in Valhalla, would there?"

To Hiccup's disappointment, Odin shook his head. "I'm afraid not," he said. "When we have need of a forge, we send our work down to Svartalfheim. They are far better smiths than any of us here. Why do you ask?"

Hiccup shrugged a shoulder sheepishly. "I'm a blacksmith myself," he said. "I've made a lot of different things in my day. Weaponry, shields, jewelry…" He gestured at his metal foot. "This thing. Dragon saddles…tailfins…" He waited, watching Odin's face carefully to see if his hinting had worked; it was difficult to interpret the god's expression with his eye patch.

After a hesitation, Odin (to Hiccup's relief) smiled. "I shall have Bragi escort you to Svartalfheim," he said. "Tell the dwarves that you were sent by Odin Allfather and that you are to be given a forge and any materials that you may require to mend your dragon's tail."

For one brief, shining moment, Hiccup was too happy for words. Then, he found his voice again, saying an emphatic "Thank you" to the king of the gods. Toothless, sensing his rider's delight, warbled his own thanks as well.

"Of course," Odin replied. "I'm nothing if not benevolent toward my people. Bragi will collect you from your rooms at sundown."

"Sundown," Hiccup repeated to himself as Odin continued past him, moving down the hallway in the direction he had been going before nearly running over the significantly smaller man with the metal leg. "Sundown." He turned to Toothless. "You know what this means, Bud," he said. Toothless gurgled a bit, to which Hiccup replied, "It means that, this time tomorrow, we could both be flying again. Together. You and me, back up in the sky."

To that, Toothless let out a small howl of enthusiasm, and Hiccup laughed, scratching his dragon under the chin. "I know, Bud," he said. "I can't wait either."

By the time the sun started setting, Hiccup was nearly shaking with excitement. He calmly excused himself from the mead hall, where he and his parents had been playing a friendly game of Maces and Talons. Valka had asked where he was going; things in the game had been getting interesting between the two former chiefs. As was his custom, Hiccup made an excuse that was so untrue that he didn't even bother remembering it. It wouldn't matter in a few hours, anyway. Because he would be back on his dragon, soaring through the sky.

It was thoughts of the wind on his face and the exhilarating bite of the cold air through his clothing that kept Hiccup from losing his patience with Bragi, who had thought it pleasant to bring a lute along on the trip to Svartalfheim, singing folksy tunes the entire time. While Bragi wasn't a poor musician, his songs got quite old and tiresome after the first hour of perpetual singing. By the time they'd arrived in the dark realm, it was nearly midnight, and thankfully so; Hiccup's patience was starting to wear thin.

The entrance to the heart of Svartalfheim looked very like an enormous crevice in a cliff—a canyon with a narrow mouth, from which emanated a steady stream of foul-smelling smoke. Hiccup leaned over the edge, gagging a bit at the rotten-egg odor that was already smothering, even at this distance.

He looked at Bragi. "I…uh…I go down there?"

Bragi nodded, shrugging a shoulder to hide a shudder. "Tell them Odin sent you," he said.

"Will they listen to me?" Hiccup asked.

With another shrug that gave Hiccup little confidence, Bragi replied, "They should. I've heard that they have ways of telling when someone's lying. So…don't lie, and you should be alright. You don't mind if I wait here for you, do you? The stench makes my vocal cords swell up."

Bragi strummed his lyre warily, his eyes flicking toward the crevice in the cliff. Hesitantly, he began to hum to himself.

Hiccup sighed, lowering the pack that Bragi had brought for him and opening it. He found a very long coil of rope, so he tied one end around the rock against which Bragi leaned, wrapping the length of it around himself. Carefully holding the tension, he leaned back against the rope and began his descent into the canyon.

The further down he got, the stronger the smell became. The stronger the smell became, the thicker the air felt, and the less light found its way into the crevice. By the time he hit the ground, the air stunk so strongly that his eyes watered, and the light was entirely gone, save that which came from the lit furnaces. Hiccup blinked hard, trying to get his vision to clear. Then, he realized that it just _was_ that smoky down inside the canyon.

He could see why Bragi wasn't too keen on following him.

Before he could take another step, a short, squat creature stood in his way. "Who are you, and where do you come from?" it asked in a voice so gravelly that Hiccup almost wasn't sure he'd made out the words correctly.

Hiccup stared at the creature. All he could think was that it was uglier than a Gronckle's backside, with tiny, beetle-black eyes and features very like a mole's. "Er…My name—" Hiccup coughed, the horrible air catching in his throat. "My name is Hiccup." He paused, wondering if he should go on. But, he figured that, if there was ever a time for full titles, this would be it. "Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third," he continued, trying to look as proud as he could, despite the fact that he felt like he was suffocating. "Dragon Master, and Chief of the Hooligan Tribe of Berk. I was sent here from Valhalla, with the permission of Odin Allfather. I require the use of a forge, as well as building materials. Odin has assured your compliance with this request."

For one, horrifying moment, the creature eyeballed Hiccup up and down, clearly checking to see if he was telling the truth. Then, without a word, the strange creature stepped aside.

As Hiccup gratefully moved past the strange creature, he stared, wide-eyed at the path before him. As far forward as he could see and just as far behind him, work stations had been hollowed out of the cliffs. Hundreds upon hundreds of forges, complete with anything even the most inventive of blacksmiths would require. Nearly all of them were currently occupied by others like the creature Hiccup had just met, and the canyon filled with the ringing of their hammers, the hiss of hot metal in cold water, the heavy _woompf_ of the bellows fanning the flames to life. All of this punctuated by the surly grunting noises that the creatures occasionally exchanged amongst themselves.

Quickly, Hiccup found an open alcove and made himself look busy. It was difficult to see in the low light, but he had thankfully spent countless nights working in the forge back on Berk. It only took a couple of minutes for his eyes to adjust. Once he could see, he started gathering materials. Everything he could ever need was right in front of him. He had his choice of leathers of various weights, and papers as an even lighter alternative. Different metals of daunting variety sat in barrels before him, and he thought one of them might even have been Gronckle iron. Quickly reaching for that particular variety, he set it out on the drafting table and began to pump the bellows.

The flames leapt up almost instantly, so Hiccup lifted the ore with a set of tongs, holding it in the flame. Once it was hot enough, he turned to the anvil to hammer it out.

For half a second, he hesitated. Did he even still remember how to make the tailfin? It had been fifteen years, after all. But he brought the hammer down on the red-hot metal anyway, thinking that he'd figured it out once before; if he'd forgotten, then he at least knew it was well within his ability to figure it out again.

Several hours passed, and Hiccup soon forgot about the darkness or the stench of Svartalfheim. All that mattered was that he was working in a forge. When he had been young, the forge had always been his escape. Even before Toothless, he spent many long nights alone, after Gobber had left, working on small, meaningless trinkets or sharpening the hundreds of weapons that lived in the blacksmith's shop. In later years, he would spend all night making saddles for dragons, starting with his own. In the midst of all that smoke and sweat, Hiccup could find the sort of mental clarity that he needed after a long day of dodging tongue-in-cheek insults or jokes that weren't all that funny. He found such solace in the hard, manual work. The creation of something completely new and original from a literal piece of rock. And, while he would trade the smithy any day for a dragon flight, he had never quite lost the part of himself that craved the sound of cold metal pounding against hot metal—that needed to see something new and beautiful taking shape right before his eyes.

He wasn't sure how long he spent working on the tailfin and saddle. By the time he was done, it could have been several weeks, even. As Hiccup resurfaced after having been so utterly lost in his work, he realized again where he was and that, in this place, the air smelled horribly foul. He was certain that he was covered in a salty layer of sweat (his hair was sticking to his forehead), and his arms were so tired that he could barely lift them. But he gathered up the tail and saddle, rolling the apparatus up and securing it with a strip of leather. As he walked away from the borrowed forge in the darkest corner of the dark realm, he was sure that he had never felt so accomplished in his life.

On the way back to the rope that he had left hanging at his entry point, the same short, squat creature that had stopped him on the way in blocked his path again. "Final product," it demanded, holding out its stubby hand.

Hiccup handed over his creation, watching the creature look it over, taking note of what materials had been used. It kept muttering things to itself, like, "slangfly leather," or "aero-hydroproof metaloxide." Hiccup was too exhausted to mind; it only made sense that such prolific smiths had a dedicated inventory man, after all. Finally, the creature rolled it all back up, just as neatly as Hiccup had, and handed it back to him. "Go with peace, Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third, Dragon Master and Chief of the Hooligan tribe of Berk," the creature said to him.

"Thank you," Hiccup replied, heading back to his rope. He slung the tailfin over his shoulder and began to climb back up to the surface, where Bragi said he would be waiting. He had momentary doubts as to whether the god would be there—how long _had_ Hiccup been working, anyway?—but they were all quelled when he heard the faint strains of lute music and even fainter humming from above. The higher he climbed, the louder it got, until—

"Hiccup!" Bragi exclaimed. "I'd thought you'd been captured! I told you not to lie to them, didn't I? They detest liars."

"I didn't lie to them," Hiccup told him. "Sorry I'm late. My work just took…a while."

Bragi stood, a shiver running through his body. "It appears you're done now, so let's go," he said, starting off in the direction they'd come.

Hiccup followed, uncertain as to why Bragi was so nervous about being in Svartalfheim. The things that lived there, aside from being hideous to look at and rather curt, had been perfectly polite to Hiccup, letting him work on his project without objection or interruption. But, Hiccup supposed, Bragi was a poet. He appreciated the beautiful and fine things in life. The denizens of Svartalfheim were neither.

The second he passed the tree with the golden apples, Hiccup thanked Bragi for his escort and then broke into a run, pelting as fast as he could toward the mead hall. When he got close enough, he called Toothless' name at the top of his lungs. From around the side of the building, the slick, black dragon appeared, howling in delight and bounding toward his rider.

Hiccup held out his hands before Toothless could tackle him to the ground, and the dragon stopped, confused. "You don't wanna break this, Bud," Hiccup said, pulling the tailfin apparatus from his back. He laid it on the ground, unfurling it for Toothless to see. "I hope I remembered it all correctly," he said. "But there's only one way to find out…"

Toothless was already eagerly nudging the saddle, so Hiccup took the opportunity. His hands seemed to move of their own accord, placing the saddle in just the right spot, fastening buckles, calibrating gears. By the time he was done, his heart was racing inside his chest.

Toothless looked at him, wiggling his body, getting used to the feeling of the saddle. Hiccup held out a hand, just like he had when he was a teenager—just like the first time he had ever touched Toothless. "What'dya say, Bud?" he asked quietly. "Wanna give this a try? I might be a little rusty, but…"

He didn't finish his sentence; Toothless had pushed his nose gently into the palm of Hiccup's hand. It felt exactly as it had all those years ago: both cool and warm at the same time, with trust and magic in the gesture.

For a second, Hiccup just looked at his dragon. "I thought I'd never see you again," he said. Toothless just blinked his huge, green eyes at him. Then, he jerked his head toward the saddle, whining for Hiccup to come on already. With a chuckle, Hiccup complied with his impatient dragon's wishes, slinging a leg over the saddle and locking his metal foot into place. He took a deep breath, hands finding their places at the front of the pommel, his other foot settling into the stirrup. A huge smile spread across his face as he leaned down, close to Toothless' ear, and said, "Let's go, Bud."

With a wailing roar and a single wingbeat, they were off.

* * *

 _Yay! A little happiness for you. You all deserve it after everything that's happened so far. Stay tuned for more next week!  
_


	9. Chapter 9

_Hello lovelies! I'm just going to say now that y'all are going to want my blood after this chapter. And I wish I was sorry. But hey. I don't like lying to you wonderful people. There's one more chapter after this, so hang in there. *inhales deeply; prepares for angry mob* Yup. Have fun!_

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Vali wove through the village early in the morning, enjoying the summer sunshine. Normally, he would have been able to take a walk like this with little interruption, but today was quite an exception to the norm. Everywhere he looked, people noticed him. Many gave him nods of approval, or reassurance. Some waved happily. A few even called things out to him, like, "See you this afternoon!" and, "Just a few more hours, Vali!"

He did his best to ignore them; the more he paid attention to them and what they were saying, the more uncomfortable the nervous gnawing in his stomach became. And he couldn't afford to get cold feet now.

In an effort to stay relatively hidden from public eye, he headed away from the town, through the forest, and up into the hills. It wasn't a short hike, but Vali had never minded. The walk gave him time to think.

It had never made sense to Vali why Eret had built his yak farm so far away from town—especially when he kept his boat moored at the docks. His dad had always told him that it was because Eret was a latecomer to the tribe. He had been accepted as a Hooligan just days after Hiccup had been named chief, so it made sense that all of the others (whose families had been on Berk for generations) had already taken the best plots of land for their own. Also, in light of what Astrid had told him and his siblings a few months ago, the distance probably wasn't very far at all if Eret had had a dragon to fly into town. He wondered if Eret had been a dragon rider, like his parents. How had the dragon thing worked, anyway? Was every inhabitant of Berk just… _given_ a huge, fire-breathing reptile? Was it part of the induction into the tribe? Did people come to the island because they already had dragons and just wanted a safe place to live with them?

Vali wondered a lot of things about the dragon years. But the thing he wondered most of all was why the dragons had left before he had been old enough to remember them. He never said as much to anyone, but he would have loved to have seen his parents fly their dragons together.

The way his mother spoke about it, her flights with Hiccup had been like a series of dances, each more complex and intimate than the one before it. Vali had seen his parents dance together once, and it had been more beautiful than he'd ever imagined. It had only been a couple of years ago—when he was fifteen. It was one of the first evenings of revelry that he had been allowed to attend. Everyone had been dancing, but Hiccup had just been spectating from the front of the room. Astrid had been dancing a reel happily with Snotlout's wife, and Snotlout had been sulking over a mug of ale. The song ended, Vali recalled, and everyone clapped. The next song was slower, and everyone in the mead hall seemed to know it; they all "oohed" and "ahhed" while turning toward Hiccup. Vali had looked up at his dad, confused, but Hiccup was smiling. Astrid, still out in the crowd of dancers, beckoned him to her, and he went, telling Vali to stay where he was. Everyone else took a step backward, giving their chief and his wife more space. And then, they danced.

It was like nothing Vali had ever seen before from his parents—or from any other Viking. They moved together, as if they both knew the steps someplace deep inside their hearts and were just letting their bodies catch up. Vali had watched, entranced, as they wound in and out of each other's arms, clasped and unclasped hands, stepped in perfect synch. He had never even imagined that his parents could look like that.

Now, as he remembered it, he realized that it wasn't his parents that he was seeing. It was love. The kind of love that makes a person smile in their sleep. The kind of love that exists not between lovers, but between best friends. Now, Vali realized that, when he had seen his parents dance that night, he had learned that they shared a soul.

He hadn't seen the same light in his mother since her dance partner had died. Almost a year ago.

With a sigh, he climbed the last hill. In the field to his left, a yak moaned through a mouthful of grass. The baby yaks from the spring pranced around on long, ungainly legs, chasing each other and having the time of their very young lives. Vali knocked on the door, but Eret called to him from around the corner, "Over here!" He followed the voice and found the man bent over a yak's hoof, filing it down.

"Hi Eret," Vali said, sitting down on an overturned bucket.

"Hello there, Vali," Eret replied. He ran the file across the yak's hoof a couple more times before straightening up and saying to the animal, "There. That ought to fix you right up." He opened the gate at his side and ushered the yak through, back into the pasture with the others. "Got a rock caught in his hoof," Eret explained. "Tore him up something ugly."

"Ah."

Eret stretched out his back after having been bent over for so long. "Before I pulled it out, his face looked about as happy as yours," he said, sitting down on the ground beside Vali and leaning back against the side of his house. "What's eating you, kid? Shouldn't you be in town? Getting ready for this afternoon?"

Vali shrugged. "I guess," he said. He was quiet for a moment, and Eret nodded sagely.

"You're nervous," he said, and it was definitely not a question. Vali let out a breath, feeling easier; Eret had always had a way of seeing in him exactly what he was feeling but couldn't quite express.

"Yeah," he admitted. "I mean, it's kind of a lot, you know?"

"Mmmm," Eret said. "I can respect that. Chief is a big responsibility."

"I mean…what if I'm not what Berk needs right now?" Vali asked. "What if I'm not a good chief? I don't know if I'm ready."

For a while, Eret didn't say anything. He plucked three pieces of long grass from the ground and braided them together. Then, he said, "You know they say your father was the best chief Berk has ever had?"

Vali groaned, burying his face in his hands. "Don't remind me."

"It' a lot to live up to, I'm sure," Eret said.

"It's _too much_ to live up to."

"Oh now I'm not so sure about that." Eret looked at him, and, though Vali couldn't see (his face was still hidden in his hands), he could feel his eyes. Slowly, Vali looked up. "I had the fortune of knowing your father briefly before his becoming chief," Eret said. "I didn't need to know him for more than a day, though, to see that he was thinking the very same things as you."

Vali blinked at him. Somehow, this news was surprising. He supposed, when he thought about it, it made complete sense for his dad to have been anxious about becoming chief. But, for some reason, Vali had always just assumed that his dad had simply come into the world a capable leader. He certainly had died that way.

Eret smiled. "Your grandfather Stoick…from what I understand, he was a tough act to follow for your dad. And he didn't get the same grace as you; when his father died, he had to step up immediately and fill the role that Stoick had left vacant. It wasn't even more than a day before Hiccup-the-chief's-son became Hiccup-the-chief. He didn't get any ceremony, either. And I can promise you that he was scared to death. Your mother told me that he actively avoided becoming chief for years before he finally didn't have a choice. He never had a politician's heart, your dad. He was an adventurer. An inventor."

"I wish I had known that side of him more," Vali said. "I mean, he was always so… _great_. Like the statues of the gods that we have around town. Too big—too awesome and important—to be real, you know?" He dragged the toe of his boot through the grass, watching the blades bend around it. "I mean, I loved him, and I know he loved me, but…he was the chief. It's hard enough to look up to someone as your dad and try to live up to their standards, but…when your dad is also the chief…"

Eret stood up and put an arm around Vali's shoulders. "I know your dad's shadow is a pretty big one," he said. "But, if he was here, he'd tell you that you're ready for this." He ruffled Vali's hair and gave him a good-natured chuff to the arm.

"You think so?" Vali replied.

"I know so." Eret grinned knowingly at Vali, who, for the first time that day, felt normal and grounded. No nerves. No anxiety. Just emptiness, which he chose to view as peace. "Now Vali, if you're still intent on avoiding people for a while longer, the yaks could do with some milking…"

Vali smiled and stood up, grabbing the bucket on which he had been sitting and turning it the right way up. "Well let's get to it, then. My dad always said that there's no job too small for a chief who loves his people."

"That's the spirit, kid," Eret said as they headed toward the paddock together.

By the time Vali got home, there was little more than an hour left before he needed to show up in the Great Hall for the ceremony. His whole family was coming, as was the entire village. But Astrid was the other vital component. She had to relinquish her status as chief, and he had to accept it. They had talked through the ceremony probably a hundred times. He knew it well by this point and could probably go through the steps in his sleep. The reason he kept going over and over it was because of his mother.

She certainly seemed to understand the ceremony. She knew what needed to happen, and it clearly frustrated her that Vali kept bringing it up time and time again. But he had to. Because, sometimes, when he ran through the steps with her, she would say the wrong thing. He had been talking through their oaths of exchange, and she, instead of saying that she gave freely the power of a chieftain, she would say that she gave it loosely. Or that she gave the color of a chieftain rather than the power.

Vali hated pointing out these errors, because his mother always got very irritated whenever he did. She'd say that she knew that it wasn't right—that she had tried to say the right words, but that it's just not what came out. And the thing that frustrated her the most was that she didn't know why.

Neither did Vali.

He was quiet as he opened the door to the house; his mother had been having headaches lately, and loud noises made them worse. Once, she had even been too dizzy to even get out of bed for hours. He climbed the stairs to Astrid's room, and, when he got there, he heard the voice of his sister through the cracked door.

"It's alright, mom," she was saying. "Just take a break."

Vali heard his mother snap testily, "I'm fine, Jorunn."

Through the crack in the door, Jorunn made eye contact with her oldest brother; she looked upset. Then, her eyes flicked to someone in the corner of the room, and Kory stood up, slipping out the door.

"Hey," Kory said.

"Hi," Vali returned. "What's going on in there?" he asked in confusion.

Kory sighed and glanced back into the room as Jorunn touched Astrid's arm comfortingly. "We don't know," he whispered. "You know how mom's been saying weird stuff and having trouble doing normal things, like lacing her boots?"

"Yeah."

"Well, she was trying to sign the transferal of power contract for the ceremony today," Kory explained quietly, "and she can barely hold a pencil. Much less get it to make letters. Jorunn's trying to keep her calm—you know how frustrated she gets when this happens."

Vali didn't say anything for a long moment. Eventually, Kory muttered, "She just hasn't been right since the lightning storm."

Vali couldn't disagree with that. About a month ago, there had been a huge lightning storm throughout the Archipelago. Things like this were common during the late spring, when the temperatures were changing and humidity was on the rise, but this one was abnormally extensive. Afterward, Astrid had gone around the island to survey the damage. While cutting through the woods, a tree limb, charred from a lightning strike, had fallen on her. The damage to the tree was so severe that the giant branch had been blown down by the breeze. It had landed right on Astrid, hitting her so hard on the head that she'd blacked out. After her children had woken her up, she'd been perfectly normal at first. Then, as time had gone on, she had slowly started to exhibit some of the bizarre and inexpiable symptoms that they were seeing in her now. Every day, she got worse. So did her headaches.

From inside the room, Jorunn waved the boys in. "Hey mom," Vali said, and Astrid smiled at him. His heart sunk a bit when he saw it; the smile was the same one that had been such a prevalent part of her expression after Hiccup had died—completely false, but definitely a valiant effort.

"Hi Vali," Astrid said, brushing her bangs out of her face. "Ready for this afternoon?"

Vali shrugged, eyes dropping briefly to the ground; Astrid had told him once that his dad had often done the same thing when he was Vali's age. "Ready as I'll ever be," he told her.

Astrid's eyes warmed, and she reached out, taking her oldest son's hand. "You'll be great," she said, and Vali heard her heart in it. "You know this ceremony by heart."

"It's not the ceremony I'm worried about," Vali confessed.

Astrid stood up from her chair and smoothed Vali's hair down, kissing him on the top of his head (she had to stand on her toes; he was just a bit taller than her). "Don't be worried," she said. "You're ready for this. Trust your instincts. That was always your dad's secret."

"Really?" For some reason, Vali was astounded by the simplicity of that. It made complete sense, but Vali had always assumed that his dad had followed a complex set of rules or something. Could being a great leader really be that easy?

Astrid smiled at him. "Sweetly." Her smile vanished in favor of an annoyed scowl. "I mean really. Really."

For a second, nobody said anything. Jorunn and Kory exchanged nervous glances behind Astrid's back. Vali tried to move forward as though nothing had happened. "You look nice," he told his mother, and she certainly did. She was decked in the full ceremonial regalia, complete with fine golden chains woven into her hair and a thick cloak of black bear fur fastened with a shining gold clasp. She'd lined her eyes in kohl, and she looked every bit as formidable as she did beautiful.

"Tinker—thing—thank you," she returned quietly, not wanting her children to hear her searching for the correct word. She looked down at her hands, turning away from Vali and sitting back at the desk that had once been Hiccup's. The official transferal or power contract was spread out on the angled wooden surface. For a long moment, she just stared at it. Then, she moved her shaking hand to pick up the pencil. Her fingers wouldn't close properly around it. "Dust," she said under her breath, but Vali knew she'd meant to swear.

She bowed her head, sighing and clearly trying to get her thoughts in order. The jumbled speech came in waves, though her moments of normality were getting slimmer and fewer. Vali had been lucky to walk into the room during one of them, but she would likely struggle with her words for the rest of the night. Which did not bode well for the ceremony.

That's what Vali told himself, anyway.

The truth was that he was intensely worried about his mother when she got like this. He had never seen anything like this before, and it scared him.

"Here, mom," he said, reaching around from behind her and taking her hand. He moved her hand over the pencil and then used his fingers to close hers around it. Then, he guided her hand over to the paper, holding her fingers closed all the while. Together, they slowly wrote out the letters of her name at the bottom of the page. It wasn't the neatest, but the contract was signed.

Astrid didn't say thank you; instead she just smiled sadly up at him. Vali could see the tears misting her eyes, and he reached out and brushed her hair out of her face, saying, "Don't cry, mom. You'll smear your kohl."

That earned a small laugh from her, and she sniffed the tears back. She didn't need to speak for Vali to know that she hated being like this. She raised a tremulous hand to her head, squeezing her eyes shut, and Vali knew her head hurt. It always hurt now. It was so bad that it drained the color from her face, though nobody mentioned how pale she was.

He wrapped her in his arms, and it was only a matter of moments before Kory and Jorunn did the same. Astrid did her best to embrace all three of her children at once, and, though her arms didn't come close to making it all the way around, none of them cared.

Jorunn muttered, "I'm sorry, mom." She took a breath and added, "You're still the best mom ever."

"And a pretty good chief, too," Kory added.

"And we don't care if you have trouble finding the right words, or if your hand shakes," Jorunn continued. "We still love you."

Astrid pulled back and kissed each one of them on their cheeks. She loved them too.

It was almost time to be heading to the great hall for the ceremony, so Vali rolled up the contract. Technically, once he had helped his mother sign it, he had become the chief. But he didn't let the gravity of that hit him. They still had a whole ceremony to go.

And he had just had an idea about how to conduct it.

Vali and Astrid stood before the citizens of Berk, elevated on a pedestal at the back of the Mead Hall. They watched the sun setting through the open doors (the crowd spilled out into the square beyond), and, the moment it disappeared below the horizon, the people grew silent, and Vali began to speak.

"Astrid, daughter of the Hofferson clan and wife into the Haddock clan, chief of the Hooligan tribe of Berk," Vali began. "Do you, this night, surrender the mantle of your authority and power to me, Vali, son of the Haddock clan and Second to the chief of the Hooligan tribe of Berk?"

The audience murmured a bit, glancing from one to another. The ceremony was normally begun by the current chief expressing those things to the new chief as a series of statements. It had never been asked as a question before.

Thankfully, nobody said anything or moved, only watching as Astrid dipped her head in a solemn nod.

"Do you freely give the power, privilege, and pride of a chieftain?"

Astrid nodded again.

Vali continued. "Do you henceforth pledge your fealty to me, offering me your loyalty in both times of peace and times of war? Can I fully depend on your blade to come to my aid, should I ever find myself in imminent peril?" Astrid nodded after each question, never once saying a word. Nonetheless, her sincerity was evident to all who witnessed, and the thick hush of ceremony fell over the crowd once more as they continued.

"Will you forever remain faithful to the Hooligan tribe of Berk, guarding its shores and its secrets until the Valkyries come to escort you into Valhalla?" Astrid nodded once more. Then, Vali drew his knife. He held it up between himself and Astrid, and she placed her hand on top of his. He drew a long strip of cloth from his pocket, winding it tightly around their conjoined hands. "I, Vali, son of the Haddock clan and Second to the chief of the Hooligan tribe of Berk, accept the responsibilities of chief from you, Astrid, daughter of the Hofferson clan and wife into the Haddock clan, taking upon myself the full authority and honor that you beheld. I vow to protect and guide this tribe to the absolute utmost of my ability, carrying it through both times of peace and times of war. My blade will defend the tribe until the Valkyries escort me home to Valhalla or until this mantle of power is again exchanged. I honor you, Astrid, daughter of the Hofferson clan and wife into the Haddock clan. Do you in equal measure honor me, Vali, son of the Haddock clan and chief of the Hooligan tribe of Berk?"

Astrid nodded again, more earnest than any of her former acknowledgments. In response, Vali unwound the cloth from their hands. Once their hands were free, Vali presented his dagger to the crowd, who applauded wildly. "Behold, your chief!" Kory announced from Vali's right hand, as was customary for the new chief's Second, and the entire tribe erupted in shouts and cheers.

From the front of the crowd, Eret winked up at Vali, who smiled down at him.

Astrid squeezed his hand affectionately, and then he was whisked away into the mass of villagers, passed bumpily from person to person, shaking their hands and accepting their congratulations. From somewhere in the back of the Mead Hall, music had already begun to play, and tables were already being pulled out and filled with an impressive array of food and beverage. Vali wasn't sure how long the confusion continued before someone handed him a mug of ale and pulled him into a dance.

Berk, like most villages in the Archipelago, was highly skilled in several areas—one of which was the art of celebration. The people of the Hooligan tribe took every opportunity to feast and dance, and the anointing of a new chief was one of the biggest causes for celebration. Nearly everybody took part in the revelry—even Jorunn led the smaller children in a dance over in the corner.

Vali was passed from partner to partner, everyone celebrating his new role in the tribe. He danced with nearly everyone, whirling around and around in a set of joyful steps punctuated by the whoops and claps of the rest of the village. He was out of breath by the time Eret caught his arm and pulled him out of the fray. "Thought you could use a drink," he told Vali, leading the way over to the table, where a mug of ale already awaited him. Vali knew he had been given a similar cup earlier, but, between the dancing and general excitement, he had lost track of it. Honestly, Ruffnut had probably swiped it when he had done a few steps with her before being shuffled off to the next person waiting. Regardless, Vali took the tankard from Eret and took a long swig. It had started to dawn on him sometime during his dancing whirlwind that he was solely responsible for the safety and well-being of each person within his range of vision. He thought about it again, chasing it with another drink.

Eret just patted his shoulder heavily, making him wobble a bit on his feet. "Remember what I said this morning," he told him. "I'm proud of you."

"Thanks," Vali said, offering a weak smile.

Eret glanced over at the head table, behind which Astrid sat, watching the revelry play out. She looked to be in pain. "Is she alright?" Eret asked.

Subtly, Vali shook his head. "Ever since that tree fell on her, she's had a hard time speaking. And doing little things, like writing or braiding her hair. She's had a raging headache for weeks, and it's only been getting worse." He looked at his mother, and then back at Eret. "Nobody knows what's wrong with her."

"I'm sure she'll be alright," Eret said, trying to infuse Vali with some small measure of confidence.

"Right," Vali said.

"She's definitely survived a lot worse."

"Right."

The song changed, and Astrid's eyes flickered up, as though she knew the tune. "Why don't you go ask your mother for a dance?" Eret suggested.

Vali nodded, standing up and leaving his mug on the table. "Mom!" he called. She looked his way. "Come dance with me!"

She smiled a bit, pushing back from the table and swinging her legs over the bench. Then, she stood up, took one step, and collapsed.

"Mom?"

Astrid didn't move.

The sound of the celebration immediately filtered to a low din in Vali's ears as he ran as fast as he could toward where his mother lay prone on the ground. Eret stood up, watching with concern. Vali shook Astrid by the shoulders. "Mom?" he said. When she didn't move, he shook her harder. "Mom!"

Around him, the people of Berk danced, drank, and moved in a colorful mass of collective excitement.

In front of him, his mother lay glassy-eye dead on the ground.

"Mom!" Vali cried, again and again, but she didn't wake up.

The party continued without him.

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 _...Like I said. My blood._

 _(So, when I originally had this story idea, this was always a thing that had to happen for it to work out. But I never was quite sure of how to do it. I considered many things, but I eventually decided on an aneurysm, since they're virtually undetectable and kill without much solid warning. For all you neuroscientists in the room, I tried to present this one as Broca's aphasia, though I don't know how well I carried it off. I'm sorry if I butchered it; we only touched on it for a few minutes during my neuroscience class in undergrad - we focused more on neuron pathways and signaling. If you're curious, look it up.)  
_

 _One chapter left. Have faith in me. I hate sad endings, and I can't bring myself to write them. See you next week!_


	10. Chapter 10

_THIS IS IT. The final chapter. Thank you to every last one of you who hung in there until the end. This one is longer than usual, so I hope it kind of makes up for the torment I've put you guys through thus far! You all are the greatest, and I love each and every one of you for reading this far. I tend to write a good bit of HTTYD fic, so be sure to follow me if you don't want to miss any new ones that I may post! I also write for other fandoms, though, so see if anything else catches your eye. If you have a request for a fandom that I write, let me know in a PM! I love requests._

 _Now buckle up, buttercups. Here we go..._

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The sun was just peeking over the horizon when Hiccup opened his eyes. He sat up and stretched, looking out the window across the room. He didn't see an excited Night Fury, so he figured he must have (for once) beaten Toothless to the waking-up punch.

He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands; like every other morning in Valhalla, this one looked perfect for a nice, long flight. He climbed out of bed, making sure the blankets weren't twisted around his metal leg. (More than once, he'd failed to realize that he was tangled before trying to stand, resulting in a painful and quite embarrassing collision with the floor—not the best way to wake up in the morning.) He pulled on the rest of his clothes quickly, the pieces of his flight suit going on next. He had been back to Svartalfheim a couple of times, using their leather to create the various parts; they were beginning to almost like him in the dark realm. They had grown used to his visits, at least, and were slightly less surly.

He buckled his vest and leaned out the window, loudly howling a Night Fury call. Then, he snatched up his helmet, put it on, and leapt out the window.

He fell perhaps ten feet before landing solidly in Toothless' saddle. "Nice catch, Bud," he said, quickly locking his metal foot into the fixture that passed for the left stirrup and shoving his boot into the right. They shot straight up into the air, climbing faster and faster with each wingbeat. Toothless wailed in joy as they turned around and around in corkscrew-like twists, his wings cutting helices in the frothy clouds. He shot a plasma blast straight up into the air, and then they leveled out in the purple, firework glow.

"Well good morning to you, too," Hiccup said through the leather of his helmet. Toothless warbled happily, so he leaned forward, giving him a scratch behind the ears. Hiccup smiled. "Let's take a lap, Bud," he said, steering Toothless off toward the forests and plains that surrounded the magnificent mead hall of Valhalla.

As they circled, some of the souls below waved up at them. Others ducked for cover. The reactions were sometimes tricky to predict, though Hiccup never minded. The people of Valhalla had slowly been, at the very least, growing accustomed to seeing a giant, black, fire-breathing war-machine prowling the halls and land; some of them had grown to enjoy being around Toothless. An older gentleman who had died over a hundred years before Hiccup had even been born would play with Toothless for hours on end. He liked the dragon so much that Hiccup had even offered for him to accompany them on a flight sometime, though the man had refused due to a fear of heights (before arriving in Valhalla, he had apparently been pushed off a cliff to his death during a battle). There was a woman who slipped Toothless leftover bits from the ongoing feast. Several of the children loved to climb all over the dragon, and Toothless would walk them around the mead hall, like a well-trained pony.

Even though many were too frightened to get near the dragon (or, often, his rider by extension), those who had previously never understood why Hiccup had been so famous in life…well, they were now getting the picture.

Hiccup was thrilled that plenty of people had come to love Toothless. As a byproduct, he had been meeting some of the most interesting individuals, swapping stories and teaching them a thing or two about dragons. A person's willingness to learn was a favorite quality of Hiccup's. He had, after all, taught an entire island of barbarians to appreciate dragons before; anyone who wanted to learn from him and Toothless received a front-row seat to a one-on-one dragon lesson. He did his best to teach them whatever he could, though there were gaps. Places in his lecture in which he had grown so used to other riders cutting in. Fishlegs, giving some intellectual fact about a dragon's jaw strength; Snotlout, taking every opportunity to assert that Monstrous Nightmares were the best breed of dragon; Astrid, backing him up and demonstrating the combative uses of various dragon attributes.

He probably missed Astrid's commentary the most.

Then again, he probably missed _Astrid_ the most. Commentary or no.

Toothless had been an excellent distraction, lifting his spirits and soothing his loneliness like a salve. He had never once regretted asking Loki for Toothless when they had seen him together that night in the cave spring. But, as amazing as Toothless was, and as wonderful as it was to have that huge part of his life back, Hiccup couldn't deny that there was still a chunk missing. A large slice of his life that smelled like blonde hair tinged with leather, metal, and wildflowers—that looked like two beautiful, blue eyes and a smile.

Hiccup felt incredibly greedy for still wanting Astrid—even after getting Toothless. He was sure that there were plenty of other souls in Valhalla that were suffering like his and languishing for those left behind in the world of the living. Even if they had chosen to relinquish their worldly memories, Hiccup knew that they had ached for a time before they'd made the decision to wipe the slate clean and start fresh. But, no matter how much he tried to tell himself that he wasn't special and that he wasn't the only one who missed somebody, he also knew something else:

Astrid wasn't an ordinary woman.

She was strong, and aggressive, and intense—fiery and smart and devoted and impulsive. Steady, but also completely unpredictable. She could fight better than most men, but she was always, _always_ a woman, feminine to the last. She was passionate, alluring, funny, kindhearted, fearless, and most definitely anything but ordinary.

So, he reasoned, missing her wouldn't feel ordinary.

Since Toothless had been returned to him, though, Hiccup had been able to keep from drowning in the memories of Astrid, instead remembering that he would see her again. Soon. So he sat up on Toothless' back, spreading his arms out to the wind and smiling.

Someday, if they could find Stormfly, there would be a Nadder and her rider chasing him. They'd race, and they'd flip, and they'd twirl, and he would sometimes let her win. But for now, the Night Fury was enough.

"To the cave, Bud," Hiccup said in Toothless' ear, and the dragon gave a small roar of understanding. Hiccup pushed his left foot forward and down in the stirrup, resulting in a smooth turn. A few wingbeats later, they were soaring low over a lake, the very tips of Toothless' wings carving out lines in the water. A cliff loomed ahead of them, the face sheer and unforgiving. Completely by accident, Hiccup and Toothless had discovered a small cave near the tideline. As they got closer, it came into view—a black dot in the rugged rock—and Hiccup steered directly at it. It was a tight fit, but Toothless had never missed it before.

They swooped up a bit, Toothless beating his wings once and then folding them, shooting like a bolt of black lightning through the mouth of the cave. They landed in the dark, safe and unscathed. "'Atta boy," Hiccup said, patting Toothless on the shoulder and then dismounting. Ever since they had found the little cave several weeks ago, Hiccup and Toothless had made it something of a private refuge for the two of them. Nobody else was ever there, so Hiccup had assumed that the spot was unknown by the others—which suited he and Toothless just fine. He pulled a few fish out of his saddlebag, feeding them to Toothless and then sitting down in the shade at the cave's mouth, letting his legs dangle over the edge toward the lake. Toothless lay down beside him, and Hiccup leaned against the dragon's side. "This is the life, 'eh Bud? Just you and me, and no crazy psychopath trying to kill us. I mean, it's kind of hard to kill us when we're already dead, but still." He stretched, watching the sun glint off his metal foot, thinking that it was indeed nice to be able to explore without worrying that someone somewhere would find them and make an attempt on their lives for one reason or another.

From inside his flight vest, Hiccup pulled a small notebook, which he set aside as he scrounged a pencil from a pocket on his thigh. He opened the book, flipping past plenty of handwritten notes that he had made yesterday, or any of the days before it. He had begun to keep a log of his and Toothless' flights, much like he had back on Berk; if anyone asked, it was because he was so rusty at dragon training. In reality, it was to keep his mind distracted, so that it wouldn't slip back into despair during these peaceful, alone moments.

"So what'da ya think, Bud?" he asked the dragon at his side. "Are those the same clouds as yesterday? Or different ones?" Toothless warbled noncommittally, and Hiccup shrugged. "Yeah, I don't remember that big, fluffy one being there before either. Guess it doesn't matter that much."

He jotted the note about the clouds down in his notebook anyway.

He and Toothless whiled away the morning like that—lazing around the cave, taking in the nature of Valhalla. Hiccup spent a solid hour examining several varieties of flowers that he had never seen before, sketching them in his notebook and concluding that they must only grow in Valhalla. After the flowers, Hiccup added several drawings of Toothless to his notes, as well as a couple ideas for new saddle designs. He then gathered a few samples of rock from the cave and put them in the saddlebag for Gobber, who loved seeing what new metals were indigenous to the area. For lunch, he and Toothless caught some fish from the lake, Toothless scarfing his down raw and Hiccup roasting his over a small fire that he'd made.

A flock of birds flapped by overhead, their shadows dappling the shimmering water. "How about we show those birds how to fly?" Hiccup asked, and Toothless got up happily, turning the saddle toward him. Hiccup mounted up, and he and Toothless spent the next while playing with the birds (who appeared to be uniquely unafraid of dragons). They looped in and out, weaving around one another, shooting up high and then plummeting low. It was mid-afternoon when the birds finally cleared, and Hiccup and Toothless, worn out, set a course for the mead hall and a dinner that they wouldn't have to catch on their own.

* * *

Astrid's eyes were heavy and difficult to open, but she managed it after a minute or two; she kept trying to slip back into the thick, hazy sleep that had only too recently lightened its grip enough for her to become aware of it. She expected brightness to assault her eyes the second they opened, but this didn't happen. Instead, she blinked a few times, letting her eyes adjust to the comfortable golden lighting.

For some reason, she felt her hands rise to her head as if searching for pain that wasn't there any longer. Then, they fell to her chest and lingered over her heart, which, she realized, was not beating.

All at once, she remembered: the horrible agony of the headaches. The utter lack of fine motor coordination. The convulsive, unpredictable words that came out of her mouth even though she'd known the correct ones in her head. The way her children had looked at her—it had broken her heart.

She took a deep breath, not quite understanding why the pain had suddenly stopped but extremely grateful for it nonetheless. She tried to think about why it had so abruptly vanished, remembering what she had been doing before—before she had arrived—

Where was she, anyway?

She looked around herself. Everything was…exceptionally pastoral. The grass was a little greener than she remembered, with flowers the likes of which she had never seen before. She was sitting under a tree with plump white blossoms scattered lushly among the leaves like pearls. The trunk was bent and twisted attractively, like a piece of art. Large, beautiful rock formations stood like statues in a garden, and, from behind one of them, came a woman dressed entirely in gold.

"Astrid Hofferson," she said with a smile, voice like a song. She brushed her golden-blonde hair back from her face, which, like the rest of her visible skin, was etched with shimmering, sensual tattoos that appeared to have been made with gold dust.

"Um…" Astrid said, not sure who the woman was but feeling entirely naked without her ax. "It's actually Haddock now. It's been Haddock for a while, actually. Like, eighteen years."

The woman smiled again. "Oh I know. I just wasn't sure if you'd remember that yet. The fresher memories sometimes take a little while to surface." She held out a delicate hand and helped Astrid to her feet. "My name is Freyja; I'm sure you've heard of me."

"Of course," Astrid replied. "Freyja. Goddess of love. Keeper of Folkvang." She hesitated. As soon as she'd said it, she'd known exactly where she was. "Um…" she hazarded, a nervous lump growing in her throat, "…am I…"

"I'm afraid so," Freyja said. "It was the headaches that got you in the end. Would you like to know how?"

Though she wasn't sure she did, Astrid said, "Sure."

"You were bleeding inside your head. That's why it hurt so much. Eventually, it killed you." Freyja shrugged. It was apparently as simple as that.

Astrid stared at her. Bleeding inside her head? She had never heard of anything so repulsive. Or grim. Then, she remembered: the tree branch. When it had fallen on her, she supposed that it had done some kind of damage that resulted in…well, probably everything. The headaches, the jumbled speech…all of it. And now, she was dead. "Wow," was all she could say.

Freyja reached out and took her hand. "I know it can sometimes be a lot to take in initially," she said in what Astrid assumed was meant to be a kind and compassionate tone, though it really came across as vaguely patronizing.

"Right," Astrid said slowly. Then, something occurred to her. "If I'm dead…then, maybe…" she turned to Freyja. "Have you by any chance seen my h—"

A loud squak changed her train of thought, and she looked up into the sky. "Stormfly!" she exclaimed, running past Freyja to the place in the field where the blue Nadder was landing. Stormfly ran at her, wings spread joyfully; Astrid met her halfway, throwing her arms around the dragon's neck. "Hey girl!" she said, scratching the dragon under the chin affectionately.

"Ah," Freyja said. "She's been absolutely forlorn waiting for you. Especially since her dragon friend left a little while ago."

Astrid looked at her. "Her dragon friend? Which one?"

"Well, let me see. Quite playful. All black, with half a tail."

"Toothless was here?" Astrid asked, Stormfly nudging her head impatiently into her chest.

Freyja shrugged. "Old age finally caught up with both he and your friend here. They arrived within weeks of each other. Completely inseparable."

Astrid scowled, confused. "Then where's Toothless?"

"He's in Valhalla now," Freyja explained begrudgingly, as though she had lost a bet or something equally embittering. "Loki came and got him. I didn't want to give him up, but Loki earned him. He took him back to Valhalla. Said there was someone there who needed him."

"Hiccup," Astrid muttered. Then, aloud, she said, "Is there any way to visit Valhalla from here?" She tried to sound casual, but inside, a wellspring of hope erupted suddenly within her chest. After losing Hiccup, the only thing she wanted in the world was to see him again. She had ached for him for almost a year. Now, she herself was in the afterlife, just like him. Maybe…

"Unfortunately, no," Freyja said, and Astrid's wellspring of hope dried up.

"Oh."

"Not unless someone like me escorts you there, at least," Freyja added.

Hesitantly, Astrid said, "Then…can't you take me there?"

Freyja shook her golden-blonde head. "I can't, no. Because you belong here in my realm. I can't take my own people out of Folkvang without also bringing them back. And believe me; there are plenty of people here that I'd love to shove off on Odin in his cozy mead hall." She shuddered a bit, holding up a hand with perfectly manicured nails. "Honestly, some of the people here…you wouldn't believe—"

"Yeah, I'm sure," Astrid interrupted, trying not to sound too disappointed. "So…there's no way I could get to Valhalla?"

Freyja pursed her lips, looking a bit petulant. Astrid assumed it had something to do with the fact that she hadn't complimented the goddess on her beautiful realm, thanked her for allowing her to spend the afterlife in such a peaceful place, or asked who had done her shimmering gold tattoos. "It's always Valhalla, isn't it?" she said. "Everyone always wants to get to Valhalla. Do they even know how difficult it is to keep Folkvang in such great condition? Let me tell you, I work at it. And, of course, I never get any thanks for my split ends and broken nails. Oh no; everyone always wants to know how to get to Valhalla."

Astrid blinked. "Um…" When Freyja frowned, she didn't think it would be the best thing to go on, explaining about her late husband and how much she missed him. "You know, I'm sure Valhalla is great and all, but I'm really starting to like it here," Astrid said. Freyja's expression softened. "It's a really beautiful place. Thank you for the warm welcome." Finishing with a sweet and winsome smile, Astrid gave in to Stormfly's impatient nudges, swinging up onto her back and settling in behind the wing joint.

Freyja seemed to appreciate Astrid's words of affirmation. "You're very welcome, Astrid," she said. "Now go indulge your dragon. She's been waiting for you." With that, Freyja dissipated into the air like a handful of golden glitter.

Astrid didn't waste any time in taking Freyja's advice. "What'da you say, girl? Want to explore this place a little?" she said to Stormfly, who hopped happily from foot to foot, clearly ecstatic to have her rider on her back again. "Alright then; let's go!"

She squeezed Stormfly's sides with her legs, and the two of them were off. The wind rushing past Astrid's face as they climbed into the sky was blissful, touching a place that she had hidden deep within her memories for years. She whooped with joy as Stormfly flattened out, soaring through a cloudbank and barrel rolling just for fun.

For hours, the two of them took command of the Folkvang sky, seeing as much of the land as they could. They grabbed a quick lunch from a stream, and Astrid learned that the salmon in the afterlife was just as delicious as it had been in life. Then, they took to the sky again, flying over the massive expanse of rolling field, dotted prettily with trees and artistic rock formations. People milled about below them, many lounging in shady patches of grass or crossing weapons with one another in playful skirmishes that seemed to always end in laughter and the shaking of hands. Nobody seemed to notice her sailing along silently through the sky; they had probably never before had much cause to look up at all.

Finally, near sunset, Stormfly and Astrid set down beside a pond that was ringed by a series of towering statues that looked to have been carved from enormous, raw boulders. The statues were so tall that Astrid couldn't see their faces once she had landed. Wildflowers speckled the grass at her feet, infusing the air with a sweet smell. The ground was soft and springy, so Astrid had no qualms about camping there. Apparently, neither did a dozen or so others, who all spread out blankets nearby. She and Stormfly caught another few fish in the pond, and, after dinner, they both laid down for the night.

Stormfly fell asleep right away, Astrid tucked safely under her wing. Astrid, however, lay awake for a bit, staring up at a sky so packed full of stars that she was sure she had no idea where in Yggdrasil she was. She wondered if Hiccup saw the same stars before he fell asleep every night.

Despite the fact that she had grown to tolerate sleeping alone over the last year, she still didn't like it. Astrid never said as much aloud, but she knew she had never slept better than when he had been lying beside her. Her favorite nights had been the ones when Hiccup had been driven to exhaustion by a long day of responsibility and chiefly tasks; it had always saddened her to see him so tired, but, unlike many struggles in her husband's life, she had at least felt that she could offer some help on these nights. There was something honest and innocent about him when he was so exhausted, and she would often let him curl up close to her, running her fingers through his hair until he fell into a deep, silent sleep. Sometimes, if he was tense, she would take a few minutes and try to massage some of that stiffness out of his shoulders. Other times, she would kiss him until he forgot the entire day preceding that moment. If he didn't remove his own metal foot, she would do it for him. He didn't always approve of this; he much preferred being able to stand and run and fight if anything unusual happened overnight. But Astrid always told him that, if any bloodthirsty savages burst into their room to kill them, she would distract them long enough for Hiccup to put his leg back on, and then they could take them as a team. When he was tired or didn't care too much, he would accept this. Still, he always hid the detached metal leg under the edge of the bed so that nobody but Astrid would know he wasn't wearing it.

Astrid sighed, watching a comet streak across the Folkvang sky. She enjoyed remembering Hiccup. Somehow, it made him feel just a little bit closer to her. She folded an arm behind her head and let her mind wander to her husband, welcoming whatever details chose to arise.

She recalled how, every night, he would pull off his boot and drop it at the foot of the bed. Then, depending on weather, he may have wriggled sleepily out of his shirt. Astrid had always liked these nights. When they had been younger, he had been extremely self-conscious about the way he looked. Consequently, it had been completely by accident the first time Astrid had ever seen him without a shirt.

They had been about nineteen. It had been during an unusually stifling heat wave, and Hiccup had been working in the forge—a place which Astrid knew must have felt like an oven on a day like that. She had broken a sweat by just sitting still in the shade; she couldn't even imagine what Hiccup had been enduring for the sake of his work. It was no wonder he had stripped his shirt off.

Astrid certainly hadn't intended to see; she had just been walking past. It had become her habit to glance toward the forge as she went by, looking to see if Hiccup was there. If he was, she would often go over to the window and pay him a brief but distracting visit. This day, when she'd looked, she had been more than a little unprepared for what she'd seen.

Not that there was anything wrong with the way Hiccup looked without a shirt. Not a thing. Astrid had just grown so used to seeing him with a shirt on—not just a shirt, but one with long sleeves and a tightly-laced collar. But to say that she was pleasantly surprised would have been something of an understatement.

He was _strong_.

Logically, she had always known this. After all, he spent his days either pounding on hot metal or wrangling five thousand pound beasts. Plus, there was that time he punched Snotlout so hard that he had spat teeth for the rest of the night and never tempted his cousin's hand again. But Hiccup didn't really look strong. He was skinny, and seeing him without a shirt didn't change that. The only difference was that Astrid realized that, while he was still long and thin with sharp ribs and collarbones, he had smooth lines all over his body, carving out patterns of lean muscle. Now she knew why he'd always felt so rock solid every time she'd ever leaned against him or hugged him. And, to top off the look, Hiccup's whole body was as freckly as his face, sprays of little brown dots covering every inch of what Astrid could see.

Astrid would have been lying if she'd said he wasn't attractive. He wasn't a god to look at, exactly; not chiseled and thick. But he was beautiful. Later, one of Astrid's favorite things would be tracing constellations in his freckles. Lying in bed together, they would go back and forth, making up stories for the people, places, and animals she drew on his skin.

Astrid stared at the sky with all of its stars, listening to Stormfly breathe deeply in slumber and finding herself relaxing just by having a living thing asleep beside her. Soon enough, Astrid was asleep too, afterimages of Hiccup's freckles still shimmering behind her eyelids.

The next morning, after a breakfast of berries and fish, Astrid and Stormfly set off again, exploring Folkvang from the sky. They found a forest and spent the day weaving in and out of the trees, practicing their aerial agility. At sunset, they returned to the pond beside which they had spent the last night, settling down in the wildflowers. Astrid was almost asleep when she was jolted wide awake by a quiet, whispery voice saying her name.

After reclaiming her senses from her dozy fog, she heard a second voice, and she realized she was overhearing a whispered conversation between two people. Careful not to let on that she wasn't asleep, she listened.

"Thank you for accommodating me so late, Milady," a smooth-as-quicksilver, male voice said. "Especially after last time—"

"Don't talk about last time," a woman—Freyja, Astrid realized—snapped.

"Alright then," the man said, and Astrid could envision him holding his hands up innocently. "It wasn't exactly fun for me either."

Freyja sighed. "She's right over there. What do you want with her?" Astrid got the sinking feeling that they were talking about her, so she tried to hold as still as possible while keeping her breathing long and deep.

"The same thing I wanted last time I was here," the man replied, his voice lowering so much that Astrid needed to strain to hear it. "Preferably without all the…you know. _Last time._ "

Freyja didn't respond at first. Astrid imagined her weighing her options. "She _did_ seem a bit intent on getting to Valhalla," Freyja muttered as if talking to herself. "I thought it was the same disregard as everybody else, but…"

The man's voice sounded excited when he said, "No, no! Don't you see? She knows! She's trying to get to him!" Freyja was quiet for a bit, so he continued, his voice smooth again. "You of all people should understand, Freyja. She loves him. He loves her. Isn't that your domain? Honestly, the way he talks about her, he had me convinced that the pair of them had to have been brought together by your hand. Chance can't cultivate a love like theirs."

"I remember bringing them together, yes," Freyja said. "They were a personal pet project of mine, Trickster; I haven't forgotten."

"Then you have to admit that what I'm suggesting would be in both of their best interests."

Freyja seemed to consider this for a very long time. The other party didn't speak, instead letting her think for as long as she needed. Finally, she said, "I've never known you to act altruistically. The dragon, I could understand. Having a Night Fury on your side in Valhalla would be a huge tip to the balance of whatever trouble you'd gotten yourself into."

Astrid gasped; she had just put the pieces together. Calling him Trickster…talking about Toothless…last time he had come to bargain…Freyja must have been talking to Loki. She didn't blame Freyja for being hesitant; even among humans, Loki's reputation preceded him.

"Freyja, dear," Loki said. "Why can't you just accept that I may be doing something nice for someone? For once in my life. I mean, everyone has moments of weakness from time to time. Like I said before, I quite like her husband, and therefore dislike seeing him with a heavy heart. I offered to bring him his wife while she was still living, but he asked me for the dragon instead. He refused to take her life because he loves her, Freyja. The dragon helped, to be sure, but there is a gap in his heart still, no matter how he tries to hide it from me. I'm the god of lies; if I couldn't see through false bravery, I'd be thoroughly undeserving of my title."

Astrid imagined Freyja pursing her lips indignantly like she had when Astrid had first met her. "You're saying that you're doing this—putting yourself in a risky position—for the love of a mortal?"

"Well, technically speaking, he's not a mortal anymore." Loki's voice sounded like a shrug. "But yes. Because I am sometimes a genuinely nice person." Freyja scoffed at that; Astrid almost did too.

"Freyja," Loki continued, sounding more earnest this time, "even you have to see that this would be the most merciful thing you could do for them. Hasn't she done enough mourning? Hasn't _he_?" When she still didn't respond, he added, "What angle could I possibly have in this? I'd love to hear it, perhaps for future ideas."

Freyja didn't dignify that with a response. After another long silence, she said, "I don't know what you're up to, but…fine. Take her."

Every muscle in Astrid's body tensed up. She almost missed Loki say, "What, just like that?" and Freyja reply venomously, "The way you talk about it, it sounds like the best thing for her. But if I hear of any misfortune befalling her, or if I hear that she was involved unwittingly in one of your schemes…"

"Oh, there's not a doubt in my mind that you'll flay me alive. I understand."

"As long as you do."

Astrid heard an eerie silence, and she assumed that Freyja had left in her shimmer of gold. She lay, stiff as a board, waiting to see what would happen next. Two gods had just been bartering for her soul, and she didn't like the way they had ended their discussion.

Something touched her shoulder, and she nearly jumped a mile in the air. More than ever before, she wished to Odin she had her ax. When she turned to look, she saw an attractive, red-headed man kneeling beside her. Before she could even open her mouth to gasp, he put a finger to his lips. When she calmed down enough for his taste, he whispered, "Astrid Haddock?"

Something about how he addressed her enticed her to hate him just a little bit less. She nodded. "Loki?" He nodded back, and she realized why she suddenly preferred him over Freyja: he had called her by her married name. It was stupid, in light of his not-so-glowing reputation, to let that change the way she viewed him, but Hiccup had always said that it was the details that people didn't even notice—those were what shaped someone's opinion of you. It was why he had always done subtle things, like letting his host speak first or giving a guest the best seat in the great hall. It was also why he had been one of the most well-loved chieftains in the entire Archipelago.

Astrid was about to say something, but Loki cut her off. "I know you have every reason in the Nine Worlds not to trust me," he said, "but I'm a friend of your husband's."

"I gathered," Astrid said. "When you were talking to Freyja."

He winced. "How much did you hear?"

"Not much," she said, even though she'd heard pretty much everything. She wanted to see how he presented the conversation to her, and she wasn't interested in biasing his words any more than she knew they already would be.

He looked relieved. "Good. Freyja and I aren't on the most…amicable terms," he said.

Astrid knew the stories as well as anyone, so she couldn't restrain the small bite of sarcasm in her voice when she replied, "I can't imagine why not."

She expected Loki to look upset or annoyed, but his eyes actually lit up, sparkling at her in a way that sent shivers up and down her arms. "Ooh, I can see why he chose you," Loki said, a grin spreading slowly across his face. In that one look, she could understand why Loki liked Hiccup so much. If there was anyone who knew how to keep life interesting—with a dry and sometimes biting sense of humor to go with it—that person was Hiccup. Now that she thought about it, he was probably Loki's exact kind of person.

"Anyway," Loki said, shaking his head a bit to clear it of whatever mischievous thoughts he had been entertaining, "I have a proposition for you."

"I'm listening."

* * *

At dinner, Hiccup always sat with his family, listening to them laugh and joke about the good old days. He hadn't heard a good deal of their stories before, and he was always incredibly glad that they'd all chosen to keep their memories after arriving in Valhalla. Tonight, at Hiccup's request, Stoick and Valka (with occasional input from Gobber) were regaling him with the sweeping tale of how they fell in love.

"I'll never forget the first time Stoick took me with him on a hunting trip," Valka said, smiling. "I'm sure Spitelout remembers it too."

"Spitelout?" Hiccup asked.

"Aye, son," Stoick explained while Valka rolled her eyes. "He's her older brother. The world was different for you and Astrid, but, when we were young, courting couples weren't allowed to be alone together. They always needed a chaperone."

"And you guys picked _Spitelout_?"

Valka shrugged good-naturedly. "He wouldn't dream of staying behind! He was always fiercely protective of me."

Stoick turned to Hiccup, saying, "Ever wonder where the blood feud between the Jorgensons and the Haddocks began?"

"Um…" Hiccup had never really considered it a blood feud, especially since the two families were entwined.

"Well it wasn't with you and Snotlout," Gobber put in. "Hate to say so, kid, but your parents beat you to that one."

Valka looked at him warmly. "You may not realize this, but your father is a good bit older than me. I was only fifteen when we started courting, and he was already chief of Berk. My brother Spitelout worried about the match for a lot of reasons, not least of which being my age."

"And then there's the fact that the wife of a chief is subject to an immense amount of scrutiny," Stoick added. "They have little privacy, even on their own wedding night."

Gobber leaned toward Hiccup, muttering in his ear, "Public consummation. Traditional, but always leaves you feeling a bit violated."

Stoick grunted. "You should try being on the other end of things."

"No thanks," Gobber said. "Just thinking of it makes me glad I'm not chief. Also, come to think of it, makes me glad I never married."

Hiccup looked at his parents. "Er…yeah. There's a reason I changed the law before my own wedding."

"You changed it?" Stoick asked, curiosity peaking.

"Yup," Hiccup returned. "I figured, since we had kind of turned over a new leaf with the dragons and all, certain…outdated laws could stand to be eradicated."

For a moment, he wasn't sure how his father would respond. He toyed with the handle of his mug, wishing his dad had an easier face to read and feeling a bit like a kid again. But then, Stoick's face cracked into a bright smile and he clapped a hand on his son's shoulder. "Good on you, son," he said. "It really was a useless law."

"I remember one time, we had to take Spitelout with us when we—"

Hiccup stopped listening to the story. He could have sworn he'd heard his name being called from somewhere behind him, but, when he turned to look, there was nobody. "Huh," he said.

"Hiccup!"

There was no denying it this time. It was louder now, and Hiccup knew where it had come from. Come to think of it, he recognized that voice…

Immediately, he pushed back from the table, standing up and turning toward the door. "No way," he breathed.

In the shaft of warm evening light that leaked through the open door stood a silhouette that he would have recognized from a mile away. He didn't need to see the blonde hair or the blue eyes or the way she beamed at him to know who he was looking at. "Astrid," he said, and a delirious smile spread across his face.

For a moment, they just stood there, staring at one another as though making any sudden movements would cause the other to vanish in a swirl of ether. Then, without even thinking to do so, he spread his arms. The spell broken, she pelted toward him as fast as she could, nearly knocking him over when she threw her arms around his neck, her feet lifting from the ground. She clung to him as though she may lose him again if she let go. He held her just as close, because a part of him worried about the same thing.

It felt like a dream—the incredibly realistic kind of dream that stayed with him even after he'd woken. But he buried his face in her braid and said her name over and over; his arms tightened around her, wondering why they'd forgotten what she felt like.

When she pulled back, he could see her smile practically radiating light. Gods, he'd missed that. Then, she kissed him, and he knew without a doubt that she was real. He forgot that he was in a mead hall full of people, or that his family was sitting at the table right behind him, or that the room had gone a bit quiet. He forgot that he was dead—that he had been dead for about a year now. He forgot about their children, wherever they were, and he even briefly forgot about his dragon, who had sat up from his place curled around the base of the table.

When she finally gave him his mouth back, he kissed her hair. He heard her laugh with delight. She said, "I was afraid I'd never see you again." He replied by kissing her cheeks, and then her forehead, and then the very tip of her nose. Then, he pressed his forehead against hers, beaming.

A second later, he pulled away, looking her in the eyes. "Wait," he said, feeling like a cold rain had just dampened his moment of shining happiness. "Wait…if—if you're here, then it means you must be…"

"Dead?" she finished.

His still heart sunk like a rock within his chest. "You're…you're _dead_?"

She smirked; he'd forgotten how much he loved her smirk. "Well so are you," she informed him, jokingly poking him in the chest.

"But wait," Hiccup said, not in the mood for jokes any longer. "That means the kids are all alone. How could you leave the kids? Who's running the island? Astrid, tell me the kids are okay."

She frowned at him, the mood changing instantly. "First of all, it's not like I had a choice, Hiccup," she said. "It's death, not a pleasure trip."

"Yeah, but—"

"Second," she interrupted, "the kids will be fine. Vali's in charge."

Hiccup's brow knit. "Yeah, he's always in charge when we're gone," he said, confused.

Astrid shook her head, looking at him significantly. "He's not just in charge of Kory and Jorunn," she told him. "He's in charge of Berk."

Hiccup swore he felt the color drain out of his face. Before he could protest, Astrid said, "I died maybe an hour after the transferal of power ceremony."

"But he's just a kid."

Astrid put a hand on his cheek. "Not anymore," she said, smiling fondly. "Hiccup, you'd be so proud of him if you could see him. He's going to make a great chief."

For the first time since he'd realized the significance of Astrid's appearance in Valhalla, Hiccup began to breathe easier. If Astrid said that Vali was ready to lead the tribe, then he knew it must have been true. Astrid had a way of seeing leadership qualities in others long before they ever saw it in themselves. "Okay," he said. "I'll take your word for it." Then, he sighed, brushing her bangs behind her ear. They slipped back out again immediately. "I guess I just panicked. Sorry I attacked you like that," he told her.

"Hiccup, it's okay," she said. Then, with a shrug, she added, "Besides, what kind of dad would you be if you didn't worry about your kids? Even from the afterlife." She smiled warmly at him, and he felt his knees nearly buckle. Gods, he loved her. So much.

Without really deciding or intending to, Hiccup leaned forward and kissed her, long and slow, as if they had all the time in the world. Which, he reminded himself, they did. Then, he rested his forehead against hers again, saying, "I'm kind of really selfishly glad you're here, Astrid."

Without missing a beat, Astrid replied, "Me too." Hiccup thought her smile could have lit the entire mead hall.

When he finally felt safe enough to look away from her for half a second, beginning to grow comfortable in the knowledge that she wasn't going anywhere, his eyes flicked up toward the door. There, in the gaping entryway stood Stormfly, enthusiastically bouncing up and down. Beside her, leaning casually against the doorframe was Loki. As soon as he saw him, Hiccup understood; Astrid and Stormfly had been part of another Folkvang reconnaissance venture. When Hiccup met Loki's eyes, the god winked and then put a finger to his lips, as if to say, _Shhh, don't tell anyone that I did this for you; let it be our little secret._ Hiccup was inclined to agree.

He took Astrid's hand, lacing their fingers tightly (just in case she vanished—he still wasn't completely certain that she was truly there). "Mom? Dad? Gobber?" he said, and they all looked at him, clearly very happy. "Can I get the rest of that story another time? I've got a bit of catching up to do." He looked at Astrid, who clung to his arm as though it was the most important thing in the world to her right then.

"Of course, son," Stoick said, and Hiccup didn't waste any time in dragging Astrid back out the front door, past Loki, who smiled smugly. Hiccup paused, not sure what to say to the man who had given him back everything he'd loved. "Oh, go on," Loki said. When Hiccup heisted, he shooed him off with his hand. "Really. Go. We can talk later." Hiccup nodded and turned to catch up with Astrid, Toothless and Stormfly following closely behind. A nice, long flight was in order, during which (if they had time), he might ask her how she'd died.

* * *

 _Well, that's it, ladies and gents! Thank you again for reading! I hope the ending was sweet enough for you. Y'all are the best, and I would love to hear your thoughts on the ending, if you get a chance! If not, that's cool too. I don't like to fish for reviews. Just leave one if you feel inclined! Hopefully, I made you feel something with this story; I know I certainly had a lot of feelings while writing it. Thank you all once again, and goodnight!  
_

 _-Faye_


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